Individual differences in acoustic variability and perceptual sensitivity to subphonemic variation

Abstract

Individual differences are robustly attested in both speech production and perception, with interspeaker variation in production frequently observed in the same domains in which extensive variation is observed across listeners in perception. This study extends existing research by examining whether the relationship between production variability and perceptual sensitivity previously observed for vowels (e.g., Perkell et al., 2008; Franken et al., 2017) is also observed for consonants. 55 speakers of American English completed two online tasks designed to evaluate individual differences in the production and perception of /s/ and /ɹ/: a sentence production task and a 4IAX perceptual discrimination task. Preliminary comparison of acoustic variability measurements from the production task and response accuracy measurements from the perception task suggest that individual differences in these two domains are sometimes, but not always, related across speakers. Specifically, production variability and perceptual sensitivity were correlated for phonologically meaningful acoustic dimensions in the liquid phoneme /ɹ/, but not for any measured dimensions in the fricative phoneme /s/.