Purpose: Supportive semantic and syntactic information can increase children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in adverse listening conditions. However, there are inconsistent findings regarding how a talker's accent or dialect modulates these context effects. Here, we compare children's and adults' abilities to capitalize on sentence…

Purpose: The present study aimed to compare acoustic models of speech intelligibility in individuals with the same disease (Parkinson's disease [PD]) and presumably similar underlying neuropathologies but with different native languages (American English [AE] and Korean). Method: A total of 48 speakers from the 4 speaker groups (AE speakers with…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate children's use of semantic context to facilitate foreign-accented word recognition in noise. Method: Monolingual American English speaking 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 168) repeated either Mandarin- or American English-accented sentences in babble, half of which contained final words that were highly…

Purpose: Ecologically realistic, spontaneous, adult-directed, longitudinal speech data of young children were described by acoustic analyses. Method: The first 2 formant frequencies of vowels produced by 6 children from different American English dialect regions were analyzed from ages 18 to 48 months. The vowels were from largely conversational…

Purpose: This study investigated nasalance in speakers from six different dialectal regions across North America using recent versions of the Nasometer. It was hypothesized that many of the sound changes observed in regional dialects of North American English would have a significant impact on measures of nasalance. Method: Samples of the Zoo…

Typically, the point vowels [i,?,u] are acoustically more peripheral in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). If caregivers seek to highlight lexically relevant contrasts in IDS, then two sounds that are contrastive should become more distinct, whereas two sounds that are surface realizations of the same underlying…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

This study investigates the cross-cultural realization of request patterns. The goal of the study is to compare the realization of requests produced by adult American English speaking learners of Russian (NNS) to that of native speakers of Russian and native speakers of English to identify the similarities and differences between native and…

Purpose: A feedback perturbation paradigm was used to investigate whether prosodic cues are controlled independently or in an integrated fashion during sentence production. Method: Twenty-one healthy speakers of American English were asked to produce sentences with emphatic stress while receiving real-time auditory feedback of their productions.…

Current theoretical approaches differ in their assessment of the influences of biomechanical and perceptual factors on speech production. This dissertation investigates these influences on the relative timing of the two gestures typically involved in the production of American English laterals: tongue tip raising and tongue dorsum backing.…

Many students will arrive at college speaking a dialect that is considered non-standardized or stigmatized due to the socially stratified nature of language. In the United States, where there are commonly held ideologies about the type of language that is considered "correct" or "proper," students who speak non-standardized…

This study investigates the phonetic implementation of stress in American English compounds by measuring the interaction of stress cues with different intonation patterns. Participants in an experiment produced compounds and phrases such as "greenhouse" and "green house" in different prosodic positions and sentence types to elicit the contrast in…

Purpose: To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and…

Speech patterns differ substantially between whites and many African Americans. I collect and analyze speech data to understand the role that speech may play in explaining racial wage differences. Among blacks, speech patterns are highly correlated with measures of skill such as schooling and AFQT scores. They are also highly correlated with the…

This dissertation develops analytical tools which enable rigorous evaluation of competing syllabic parses on the basis of temporal patterns in speech production data. The data come from the articulographic tracking of fleshpoints on target speech organs, e.g., tongue, lips, jaw, in experiments with native speakers of American English and Moroccan…