Shadowing fluent speech: The effects of mispronouncing word‐initial consonants

Abstract

A shadowing task was employed to investigate normal listeners' ability to detect alterations in word‐initial consonants. The same 600‐word prose passage, containing 14 two‐syllable target words with syllable‐initial stress was employed in three separate experimental conditions so that the word‐initial consonant was either altered by (1) a one distinctive feature change [Chomsky and Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (Harper and Row, New York, 1968)], (2) a three distinctive feature change, or (3) completely deleting the word‐initial consonant. The target words were selected to be predictable from context and were examined for frequency of occurrence in English. There were 16 subjects in each condition. The subjects' shadowed responses were recorded on tape and analyzed to determine whether certain lexical or phonetic information was particularly salient in guiding the listener's shadowing behavior. Specifically, subject's responses were analyzed as to whether the part of speech, morpheme boundary, number of syllables, stressed vowel, and lexical stress were maintained when shadowing the mispronounced target words. Each of these items will be discussed as to their relative importance in lexical access while shadowing fluent speech.