Effects of local lexical competition and regional dialect on vowel production

Global measures of lexical competition, such as lexical neighborhood density, assume that all phonological contrasts contribute equally to competition. However, effects of local phonetic similarity have also been observed in speech production processes, suggesting that some contrasts may lead to gre...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2014-07, Vol.136 (1), p.1-4
Main Authors: Clopper, Cynthia G, Tamati, Terrin N
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Humans
Letters to the Editor
Phonetics
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Speech Acoustics
Speech Production Measurement
Voice Quality
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Global measures of lexical competition, such as lexical neighborhood density, assume that all phonological contrasts contribute equally to competition. However, effects of local phonetic similarity have also been observed in speech production processes, suggesting that some contrasts may lead to greater competition than others. In the current study, the effect of local lexical competition on vowel production was examined across two dialects of American English that differ in the phonetic similarity of the low-front and low-back vowel pairs. Results revealed a significant interaction between regional dialect and local lexical competition on the acoustic distance within each vowel pair. Local lexical contrast led to greater acoustic distance between vowels, as expected, but this effect was significantly enhanced for acoustically similar dialect-specific variants. These results were independent of global neighborhood density, suggesting that local lexical competition may contribute to the realization of sociolinguistic variation and phonological change.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4883478