Talker voice and similarity affect lexical neighborhoods

Abstract

Words that are similar to a syllable can influence listeners perception of phonemes in the syllable. Known as the lexical neighborhood effect, this has been shown to be robust, but vary in magnitude across talkers. In previous studies [L. Zimack and J. Sawusch, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 107, 2918 (2000)], series of nonword syllables were tested in two voices. In one voice, an effect of neighborhood on phonetic perception was clearly found. In the other voice, this effect was absent. The pattern of results suggested that there may be differences in the composition of neighborhoods across different talkers. New studies have explored acoustic–phonetic factors in voices that may underlie this variation. The influence of neighborhood has been examined across syllables from 10 talkers. Measurements of syllable duration, speaking rate, and formant frequencies have also been made for these 10 talkers. Across the talkers, there is variation in the effect of neighborhood on phoneme perception. These data will be presented along with acoustic measurements of vowel spaces and other qualities that may influence the similarity of phonemes and words to one another and thus alter the influence of neighborhood upon perception. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant R01DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]