Production effects in light of perceptual evaluation Tempo effects for phonologization into consonant allophony
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Abstract
Many acoustic attributes that indicate phonological contrasts involve dynamic properties, and thus these attributes are pervasively subject to the effects of tempo modulation. However, listeners are very proficient at accounting for these effects in retrieving phonological information. This raises the question of whether tempo modulation effects, though pervasive, are relevant for phonological systems, since perceivers apparently undo them. The current paper reports two interlocking tasks, 1) a metronomic production task, requiring participants to repeatedly articulate plosive laryngeal contrasts in prevocalic and postvocalic positions in American English, and 2) a perceptual task, requiring participants to identify these. Voice onset time for prevocalic /p/, and vowel duration for postvocalic /p/ exhibit extreme variation which is correlated with repetition tempo. Perceptual responses systematically show a high overall identification accuracy. Error rates, however, increase in fast rate productions. The direction of the errors is opposite in onset vs. coda contexts, mirroring the effects of syllabic position in phonological systems; onset segments shift in the voiceless and aspirated direction, and coda segments shift in the voiced and unaspirated direction. The paper concludes by discussing how production-to-perception mismatches might, in time, become encoded in phonological patterns.
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