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Updated: Apr 16, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
The time-course of speaking rate compensation: Effects of sentential rate and vowel length on voicing judgments
Joseph C Toscano1, Bob McMurray2
1Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801.
Abstract:
Many sources of context information in speech (such as speaking rate) occur either before or after the phonetic cues they influence, yet there is little work examining the time-course of these effects. Here, we investigate how listeners compensate for preceding sentence rate and subsequent vowel length (a secondary cue that has been used as a proxy for speaking rate) when categorizing words varying in voice-onset time (VOT). Participants selected visual objects in a display while their eye-movements were recorded, allowing us to examine when each source of information had an effect on lexical processing. We found that the effect of VOT preceded that of vowel length, suggesting that each cue is used as it becomes available. In a second experiment, we found that, in contrast, the effect of preceding sentence rate occurred simultaneously with VOT, suggesting that listeners interpret VOT relative to preceding rate.
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