Phonetic variation and the recognition of words with pronunciation variants

Abstract Studies on the effects of pronunciation variants on spoken word recognition have seemingly contradictory results -some find support for a lexical representation that contains a frequent variant, others, an infrequent (but idealized) variant. We argue that this paradox is resolved by appealing to the phonetics of the overall word. In two phoneme categorization studies, we examined the categorization of the initial sounds of words that contain either tap or [t]. Listeners identified the initial sound of items along a voiced-voiceless continuum (e,g, bottom-pottom, produced with word-medial [t] or tap). No preference for wordforming responses for either variant was found. But, a bias toward voiced responses for words with [t] was found. We suggest this reflects a categorization bias dependent on speaking style, and claim that the difference in responses to words with different variants is best attributed to the phonetic composition of the word, not to a particular pronunciation variant

Lexical inhibition and sublexical facilitation are surprisingly long lasting.

When a listener hears a word (beef), current theories of spoken word recognition posit the activation of both lexical (beef) and sublexical (/b/, /i/, /f/) representations. No lexical representation can be settled on for an unfamiliar utterance ( peef). The authors examined the perception of nonwords ( peef) as a function of words or nonwords heard 10 -20 min earlier. In lexical decision, nonword recognition responses were delayed if a similar word had been heard earlier. In contrast, nonword processing was facilitated by the earlier presentation of a similar nonword (baff-paff). This pattern was observed for both word-initial (beef-peef), and word-final (job-jop) deviation. With the word-in-noise task, real word primes (beef) increased real word intrusions for the target nonword (peef), but only consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) intrusions were increased with similar pseudoword primes (baff-paff). The results across tasks and experiments support both a lexical neighborhood view of activation and sublexical representations based on chunks larger than individual phonemes (CV or VC sequences)

Associations between adjustment disorder and hospital-based infections in the Danish population.

OBJECTIVE:There is some evidence that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with increased risk of infections, and it is unknown whether adjustment disorder is as well. We assessed the association between adjustment disorder and subsequent infections, and assessed additive interaction with sex. METHODS:The study population included a nationwide cohort of all Danish-born residents of Denmark diagnosed with adjustment disorder between 1995 and 2011, and an age- and sex-matched general population comparison cohort. We compared rates of infections requiring inpatient or outpatient hospitalization in the two cohorts. We fit Cox proportional hazards models to compute adjusted hazard ratios (aHR) for the associations between adjustment disorder and 32 types of infections, and calculated interaction contrasts to assess interaction between adjustment disorder and sex. RESULTS:Adjustment disorder was associated with increased rates of infections overall (n = 19,838 infections, aHR = 1.8, 95% confidence interval = 1.8. 1.9), and increased rates of each individual infection type (aHRs for 30 infections ranged from 1.5 to 2.3), adjusting for baseline psychiatric and somatic comorbidities and marital status. For many infection types (e.g., skin infections, pneumonia), interaction contrasts indicated rate differences were greater among men than women, while for two (urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted infections), rate differences were greater for women. CONCLUSIONS:These findings are consistent with studies examining the relationship between psychological stress and infections, and between PTSD and infections. They may be explained by a combination of the triggering of unhealthy behaviors as well as immune responses to stress

The Socio-Economic Significance of Four Phonetic Characteristics in North American English

This paper uses a least-square regression method that relates per-capita income to four phonetic characteristics (r-dropping, and the so-called father-bother, cot-caught and pin-pen mergers), to study the socio-economic significance of those characteristics in North American English. As a result we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between per-capita income and r-dropping, and between per-capita income and the presence of the cot-caught merger, and a negative and statistically significant relationship between per-capita income and the pin-pen merger. No statistically significant relationship is found, however, between per-capita income and the presence of a father-bother merger or split

The Youth Collaborative Mental Health Survey: A Community-Based Participatory Research Approach Using Constructivism With Majority Hispanic Youth

Youth today face novel mental health challenges compared to youth of previous generations. Youth voice in research is necessary to better understand and alleviate this national youth mental health crisis, but current U.S. nationally representative datasets on youth mental health lack youth voice in their survey designs. The academic team collaborated with 19 high school students to design a comprehensive youth mental health survey called the Youth Collaborative Mental Health Survey (YCMHS). The youth co-investigators represented the diversity of San Antonio, Texas, and were majority Hispanic. The constructivism pedagogy in education, which empowers youth voice in the learning process, was utilized to facilitate the youth-led creation of the YCMHS. During eight 2-hour meetings, the youth co-investigators designed the YCMHS with 20 domains and 195 questions. The YCMHS embraced respondent flexibility and voice and included 42 conditional response questions and 29 free-text response questions. The youth co-investigators led the survey administration at five schools during the 2020–2021 school year. The youth-led research design also strengthened collaboration between community and school partners. Takeaways from the academic team include the importance of being flexible and patient and advocating for the youth collaborators. Takeaways from the youth co-investigators include the importance of being open-minded, asking honest questions related to youth mental health, and being persistent. Future work will strengthen the scientific rigor of the YCMHS and highlight preliminary survey results

The role of variation in the perception of accented speech.

a b s t r a c t Phonetic variation has been considered a barrier that listeners must overcome in speech perception, but has been proved beneficial in category learning. In this paper, I show that listeners use within-speaker variation to accommodate gross categorical variation. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p-initial words in English produced by a native speaker of French. Critically, listeners are trained on these words with either invariant or highly-variable VOTs. While a gross boundary shift is made for participants exposed to the variable VOTs, no such shift is observed after exposure to the invariant stimuli. These data suggest that increasing variation improves the mapping of perceptually mismatched stimuli

Phonetic variation and the recognition of words with pronunciation variants

Abstract Studies on the effects of pronunciation variants on spoken word recognition have seemingly contradictory results -some find support for a lexical representation that contains a frequent variant, others, an infrequent (but idealized) variant. We argue that this paradox is resolved by appealing to the phonetics of the overall word. In two phoneme categorization studies, we examined the categorization of the initial sounds of words that contain either tap or [t]. Listeners identified the initial sound of items along a voiced-voiceless continuum (e,g, bottom-pottom, produced with word-medial [t] or tap). No preference for wordforming responses for either variant was found. But, a bias toward voiced responses for words with [t] was found. We suggest this reflects a categorization bias dependent on speaking style, and claim that the difference in responses to words with different variants is best attributed to the phonetic composition of the word, not to a particular pronunciation variant

Voice-specific effects in semantic association

Benefits to lexical access are provided by acoustically-cued speaker characteristics (such as gender and age), but little work has investigated these effects in meaning-based tasks. Word recognition is affected both by a word’s base-level activation and by associative spread of activation among words, and is correlated with speed of lexical access. In a free association task and a semantic priming task, we find off-line and on-line evidence of speaker-specific relationships between words. Our results suggest the need to extend existing models of spoken word recognition to include interactions between linguistic information and social information that is cued by variation in speech

Semantic priming across speakers and listeners of Latino varieties of English

We examine how the variation present in a Latino variety of English spoken by Miami-based Cuban Americans, which is not a foreign accent, affects processing for two distinct listener populations, General American English listeners and LA-based Mexican American English listeners. Past research has appealed to notions of standardness and familiarity when explaining processing costs associated with foreign and regional accents. Studying two listener populations that have different relationships with standard and Latino varieties of English has the potential to disentangle these factors (i.e. familiarity, standardness). Through three semantic priming experiments, which measure online processing, it’s shown that the variation present in Cuban American speech does not affect priming facilitation for General American English listeners or LA-based Mexican American listeners, suggesting that our human processing system is generally flexible at accommodating variation and that it’s worth studying the effects of variation at levels beyond the extremes