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Increased exposure and phonetic context help listeners recognize allophonic variants.
Malte C Viebahn1, Paul A Luce2
1Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Neumarkt 9-19, 04109, Leipzig, Germany. malte.viebahn@uni-leipzig.de.
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|April 26, 2018
Summary
Listeners can better recognize words with nasal flaps (e.g., "cenner") when they hear them more often or in casual speech. This shows how adaptable our speech perception is to variations.
Area of Science:
- Phonetics and phonology
- Psycholinguistics
- Speech perception
Background:
- Nasal flaps in American English (e.g., 'cenner') are frequent but recognized slower than canonical /nt/ pronunciations.
- Listeners exhibit a processing disadvantage for these common allophonic variants.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how increased exposure and phonetic context affect the recognition of nasal flap variants.
- To determine if listeners adapt to phonetic variation in speech.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted to test the influence of exposure and context on word recognition.
- Participants recognized flapped variants in isolation and within casual vs. careful sentence contexts.
Main Results:
- Experiment 1: Recognition time for flapped variants decreased with exposure, while accuracy increased.
- Experiment 2: Flapped variants in casual speech were recognized faster than in careful speech, particularly in later responses.
- Context effects were specific to flapped variants, not canonical ones.
Conclusions:
- Increased listener exposure and casual phonetic context facilitate the recognition of allophonic variants.
- Findings support the adaptability of speech perception to phonetic variation.
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