The effects of lexical neighbors on stop consonant articulation.

Lexical neighbors (words sharing phonological structure with a target word) have been shown to influence the expression of phonetic contrasts for vowels and initial voiceless consonants. Focusing on minimal pair neighbors (e.g., bud-but), this research extends this work by examining the production of voiced as well as voiceless stops in both initial and final syllable/word position. The results show minimal pair neighbors can result both in enhancement and reduction of voicing contrasts (in initial vs final position), and differentially affect voiced vs voiceless consonants. These diverse effects of minimal pair neighbors serve to constrain interactive theories of language processing.

[1]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Effects of speaking rate on voice-onset time in Thai, French, and English , 1997 .

[2]  Arthur S. Abramson,et al.  Crosslanguage Study of Voicing in Initial Stops , 1963 .

[3]  Melissa Baese-Berk,et al.  Phonological Neighborhood Effects in Spoken Word Production: An fMRI Study , 2011, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[4]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements: Evidence for Continuous Mapping Models , 1998 .

[5]  Matthew Goldrick,et al.  Mechanisms of interaction in speech production , 2009, Language and cognitive processes.

[6]  Mariapaola D'Imperio,et al.  Lexical and contextual predictability: Confluent effects on the production of vowels , 2010 .

[7]  R. Wright.  Phonetic Interpretation Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI: Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation , 2004 .

[8]  B. Munson,et al.  The effect of phonological neighborhood density on vowel articulation. , 2004, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[9]  G. Dell,et al.  The sequential cuing effect in speech production , 1994, Cognition.

[10]  G. E. Peterson,et al.  Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English , 1960 .

[11]  Janet B. Pierrehumbert,et al.  Word-specific phonetics , 2001 .

[12]  M. Vitevitch,et al.  Sublexical and lexical representations in speech production: effects of phonotactic probability and onset density. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[13]  Matthew Y. Chen.  Vowel Length Variation as a Function of the Voicing of the Consonant Environment , 1970 .

[14]  Keith Johnson,et al.  Why reduce? Phonological neighborhood density and phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech , 2012 .