Vowels In Words Research Articles

Voice quality as a correlate of stop coda voicing in developing speech

Previous work reported that two children from the Imbrie Corpus (2005) tend to produce noise at the end of the nuclear vowel in words with [-voice] stop codas (duck, cup), but not in words with [+voice] codas (tub, bug) [JASA 123, 3320]. This noise resembles the preaspiration reported for adult speech in some languages. In this paper the earlier work is extended to the remaining eight children in this corpus of speech from 2- to 3-year old children learning American English. Furthermore, for nine subjects we compare their behavior to that of their primary female caregiver. Many of the children produce unvoiced coda stops that are coded as being strongly preaspirated. Their caregivers also produce vowel-final noise preceding [-voice] stops, but these tend to be coded as being weakly preaspirated. For both child and adult subjects preaspiration is more likely to occur for /k/ than for /p/. A few subjects produce irregular voicing rather than noise before [-voice] coda stops. More detailed acoustic measures such as durations and relative intensities will be presented. In addition, the acoustics are used to infer the physiology behind these voice quality differences between children and adults. [Work support from NIH R01DC00075, R01HD057606.]

Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French: The role of lexical factors

In this study we investigate vowel reduction and the role of some lexical factors in the production of vowels extracted from a corpus of French conversations. Vowel durations and spectral quality are examined with respect to (1) their interaction in the corpus, (2) the position of vowels in words, and (3) word frequency and word category. The analyses are conducted on vowels produced by 16 speakers. Our study provides strong evidence that vowel reduction (decrease in durations and more centralized spectral values) affects most of the vowels in conversational speech. The results show that vowels in final syllables of words were less often reduced while the preceding ones show reduced durations and centralized formant values. Moreover vowels are more reduced in monosyllabic function words than in monosyllabic content words. Nevertheless, we did not find a clear effect of word frequency on vowel durations. Finally, our study shows that vowel reduction depends on several factors related to lexical properties (word category) and to prosodic properties (stress and final lengthening).

Modulation of phonetic duration by morphological and lexical predictors.

This study investigates how the duration of the stem vowel of regular and irregular English verbs is modulated by tense (present and past), regularity, lexical frequency, gang size of the vocalic alternation, imageability ratings, and vowel quality. The vocalic durations of 48 monosyllabic irregular verbs and 171 regular verbs were extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of spontaneous speech. A linear mixed effects regression model revealed that vowels of past tense forms tend to have longer durations than vowels of present tense forms, that vowels of words that are less imageable are realized with shorter durations, and that tense vowels are longer than lax vowels. Surprisingly, higher frequency irregular past tense forms were produced with longer vowels, contradicting Aylett and Turk [(2004); (2006)] and Bell et al. [(2003); (2009)]. Further, vowels were shorter for irregular verbs with larger vocalic alternation gangs, contradicting the predictions of Kuperman et al. [(2007)] but supporting hypotheses that units with a smaller information load have shorter durations. This pattern of results is interpreted as a consequence of the pressure for regularization during the production of irregular past tense forms.

Bilateral Cochlear Implants in Infants

The purpose of this feasibility study was to evaluate whether the use of a shorter-length cochlear implant (10 mm) on one ear and a standard electrode (24 mm) on the contralateral ear is a viable bilateral option for children with profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. A secondary purpose of this study was to determine whether the ear with the shorter-length electrode performs similarly to the standard-length electrode. Our goal was to provide an option of electrical stimulation that theoretically might preserve the structures of the scala media and organ of Corti. The study is being conducted as a repeated-measure, single-subject experiment. University of Iowa-Department of Otolaryngology. Eight pediatric patients with profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss between the ages of 12 and 24 months. Nucleus Hybrid S12 10-mm electrode and a Nucleus Freedom implant in the contralateral ear. The Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS) parent questionnaire, Early Speech Perception, Glendonald Auditory Screening Procedure word test, and Children's Vowel tests will be used to evaluate speech perception and the Minnesota Child Development Inventory and Preschool Language Scales 3 test will be used to evaluate language growth. Preliminary results for 8 children have been collected before and after the operation using the IT-MAIS. All 3 children showed incremental improvements in their IT-MAIS scores overtime. Early Speech Perception, Glendonald Auditory Screening Procedure word test, and Children's Vowel word perception results indicated no difference between the individual ears for the 2 children tested. Performance compared with age-matched children implanted with standard bilateral cochlear implants showed similar results to the children implanted with Nucleus Hybrid S12 10-mm electrode and a Nucleus Freedom implant in contralateral ears. The use of a shorter-length cochlear implant on one ear and a standard-length electrode on the contralateral ear might provide a viable option for bilateral cochlear implantation in children with bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss. Further study of this patient population will be continued.

Anaesthesia and Intensive Care A-Z: An Encyclopaedia of Principles and Practice, 4th Edition.

Anaesthesia and Intensive Care A-Z: An Encyclopaedia of Principles and Practice, 4th Edition. By Steven M. Yentis, B.Sc., M.B.B.S., F.R.C.A., M.D., M.A., Nicholas P. Hirsch, M.B.B.S., F.R.C.A., F.R.C.P., Gary B. Smith, B.M., F.R.C.A., F.R.C.P. Philadelphia, Churchill Livingstone, 2009. Pages: 584 (paperback). Price: $136.00.This book was last revised in 2004. With several new and revised entries, this edition reflects ongoing advances in the fields of anesthesia and critical care. According to the preface, the authors initially created the book as a review for candidates taking the Royal College of Anesthetists' Fellowship examinations, which explains its format of short, high-yield entries.Like the popular street atlas London A-Z , which covers every street, highway, major point of interest, park, school, and tube station in London, this book is comprehensive. It consists of hundreds of alphabetized entries ranging from the common to the obscure. Topics relevant to the practice of anesthesia and critical care include pharmacology, diseases, physiology, anatomy, and history. As the title suggests, the entries are arranged alphabetically, with extensive cross-references to ensure full coverage of topics and ready access to related information. The cross-references are numerous and are easily identified by bold print. The alphabetical arrangement makes up for the lack of an index. There are many tables, graphs, and figures in black and white and grayscale that are generally well done and useful. Some entries have a relevant reference generally from the last decade, which we favor, although these references supply only the journal and author information without the article's title. Having just completed Part I of the American Board of Anesthesiology certifying examination and the examination for Maintenance of Certification for Anesthesia, we put this book through the paces. Every topic that we could recall from the tests had an entry in the book.The authors should be commended for the impressive breath of content, but some criticisms have to be discussed. Much of the difficulty we experienced with the book is a result of the differing British and American anesthesia certifying systems. Most of the principles remain the same regardless of geographic location, but the American Board of Anesthesiology examinations distinguish between anesthesia and critical care. In a 584-page book covering anesthesia and critical care, this breadth necessarily comes at the expense of depth of coverage. There is a palpable British influence throughout the text with entries such as “triservice apparatus, an anesthetic apparatus adopted by the British Armed Forces for battle use.” The entry on postoperative shivering lists pethidine and pentazocine as possible treatments, and the differences in units of measurements led to an entry recommending 8 mmol of magnesium sulfate for use in advanced cardiac life support. Although it is easy enough to remove the extra vowels in words like anaesthesia, most American anesthesia providers would not be familiar with those drugs or dosages. The British influence does have its advantages. There are many instances where A-Z's approach yields a slightly different emphasis or explanation that brings the American reader a new view of the topic.The question is for whom and for what purpose is this book useful? The authors have produced clear, succinct text and helpful illustrations that provide high-yield information in a single volume. Its format and style are reminiscent of a handbook, but it is too bulky for that use. The lack of a thematic organization to the text, such as preoperative assessment, makes it difficult to recommend as an introductory text for anesthesia or critical care practitioners. The authors bill the book as a review for the British certifying examination, with which we have no experience. As a review book for the written examination for the American Board of Anesthesiology, the length is too long, its format too awkward, and it does not emphasize key study points. A good review book should alert the reader to especially important, commonly tested concepts, and it should delineate concepts as distinctive, most common, or most likely to occur. However, there is a niche for Anaesthesia and Intensive Care A-Z. We believe that this book may be most useful as an intraoperative reference, especially for trainees, or as a first-line reference to use while completing practice questions from another source. Its often fresh approach to familiar topics, presumably reflecting the differences in British training and practice, is useful especially in learning about difficult concepts. Finally, its unique format of highly cross-referenced entries, reminiscent of Internet text with embedded links, will appeal to many modern readers accustomed to this integrated content.*University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California. johnsonx@anesthesia.ucsf.edu

Changing meaning causes coupling changes within higher levels of the cortical hierarchy

Processing of speech and nonspeech sounds occurs bilaterally within primary auditory cortex and surrounding regions of the superior temporal gyrus; however, the manner in which these regions interact during speech and nonspeech processing is not well understood. Here, we investigate the underlying neuronal architecture of the auditory system with magnetoencephalography and a mismatch paradigm. We used a spoken word as a repeating "standard" and periodically introduced 3 "oddball" stimuli that differed in the frequency spectrum of the word's vowel. The closest deviant was perceived as the same vowel as the standard, whereas the other 2 deviants were perceived as belonging to different vowel categories. The neuronal responses to these vowel stimuli were compared with responses elicited by perceptually matched tone stimuli under the same paradigm. For both speech and tones, deviant stimuli induced coupling changes within the same bilateral temporal lobe system. However, vowel oddball effects increased coupling within the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, whereas perceptually equivalent nonspeech oddball effects increased coupling within the right primary auditory cortex. Thus, we show a dissociation in neuronal interactions, occurring at both different hierarchal levels of the auditory system (superior temporal versus primary auditory cortex) and in different hemispheres (left versus right). This hierarchical specificity depends on whether auditory stimuli are embedded in a perceptual context (i.e., a word). Furthermore, our lateralization results suggest left hemisphere specificity for the processing of phonological stimuli, regardless of their elemental (i.e., spectrotemporal) characteristics.

Now you hear it, now you don't: Vowel devoicing in Japanese infant-directed speech

In this work, we examine a context in which a conflict arises between two roles that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays: making language structure salient and modeling the adult form of a language. Vowel devoicing in fluent adult Japanese creates violations of the canonical Japanese consonant-vowel word structure pattern by systematically devoicing particular vowels, yielding surface consonant clusters. We measured vowel devoicing rates in a corpus of infant- and adult-directed Japanese speech, for both read and spontaneous speech, and found that the mothers in our study preserve the fluent adult form of the language and mask underlying phonological structure by devoicing vowels in infant-directed speech at virtually the same rates as those for adult-directed speech. The results highlight the complex interrelationships among the modifications to adult speech that comprise infant-directed speech, and that form the input from which infants begin to build the eventual mature form of their native language.

Compensatory Vowel Lengthening for Omitted Coda Consonants: A Phonetic Investigation of Children's Early Representations of Prosodic Words

Children's early word productions often differ from the target form, sometimes exhibiting vowel lengthening when word-final coda consonants are omitted (e.g., dog /dog/ --> [d(c):]). It has typically been assumed that such minimal words lengthening compensates for a missing prosodic unit (a mora). However, this study raises the alternative hypothesis that vowel lengthening in early productions compensates for the missing coda segment. If lengthening selectively occurs with short/lax vowels but not long/tense vowels, this would provide support for the hypothesis that lengthening serves to preserve bimoraic or 'minimal word' structure. However, if lengthening occurs across the board, this would indicate that lengthening compensates for the omitted segment. In order to address this issue, matched word pairs produced with and without a coda were extracted from the spontaneous speech of three English-speaking children between the ages of 1 ;1 and 2;6. Phonetic analysis compared the duration of vowels in words with and without the coda. The results showed that two children lengthened both short and long vowels when the coda was omitted, whereas one child selectively lengthened only short vowels. The implications of these findings, both for the representation of prosodic words, and for theories of production more generally, are discussed.

Reading in Thai: the case of misaligned vowels

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in writing but follow it in speech, hence a mismatch between the spoken and written sequence occurs, for example ‘flat’ is spoken as /bɛ:n/ or in a more severely misaligned example where the vowel operates across syllables the word ‘insect’ is spoken as /m(a)lɛ:ŋ/. In order to investigate if there is a processing cost associated with this discrepancy between spoken and written sequence for vowels and the implications this has in relation to the grain size used when reading Thai, eye movements of adults reading words with and without misaligned vowels in sentences using the EyeLink II tracking system was conducted. Twenty-four university students read 50 pairs of words with misaligned and aligned vowel words matched for length and frequency embedded in same sentence frames. In addition, rapid naming data from forty adults was collected. Data from forty children 6;6–8;6 years old reading and spelling comparable words was also collected and analysed for errors. Results revealed a processing cost due to the more severely misaligned words where the vowel operates across the syllable, and gives support for a syllabic level of segmentation rather than phonemic for reading and spelling in Thai adults and children.

Phonological Specificity of Vowel Contrasts at 18-months

Previous research has shown that English infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words by as early as 15-months of age. These results suggest that not only are infants sensitive to large mispronunciations of the vowels in words, but also sensitive to smaller mispronunciations, involving changes to only one dimension of the vowel. The current study broadens this research by comparing infants' sensitivity to the different types of changes involved in the mispronunciations. These included changes to the backness, height, and roundedness of the vowel. Our results confirm that 18-month-olds are sensitive to small changes to the vowels in familiar words. Our results also indicate a differential sensitivity of vocalic specification, with infants being more sensitive to changes in vowel height and vowel backness than vowel roundedness. Taken together, the results provide clear evidence for specificity of vowels and vocalic features such as vowel height and backness in infants' lexical representations.

Brain Activation for Consonants and Vowels

Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have shown dissociation between consonants and vowels. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether vowel and consonant processing differences are expressed in the neuronal activation pattern and whether they are modulated by task. The experimental design involved reading aloud and lexical decision on visually presented pseudowords created by transposing or replacing consonants or vowels in words. During reading aloud, changing vowels relative to consonants increased activation in a right middle temporal area previously associated with prosodic processing of speech input. In contrast, during lexical decision, changing consonants relative to vowels increased activation in a right middle frontal area associated with inhibiting go-responses. The task-sensitive nature of these effects demonstrates that consonants and vowels differ at a processing, rather than stimulus, level. We argue that prosodic processing of vowel changes arise during self-monitoring of speech output, whereas greater inhibition of go-responses to consonant changes follows insufficient lexico-semantic processing when nonwords looking particularly like words must be rejected. Our results are consistent with claims that vowels and consonants place differential demands on prosodic and lexico-semantic processing, respectively. They also highlight the different types of information that can be drawn from functional imaging and neuropsychological studies.

Perception of English High Vowels: Duration as a Cue by Korean Speakers of English

This study examines the acoustic characteristics of English high tense and lax vowels (/i, I, u, ʊ/) and the perceptual difference of those vowels between English speakers and Korean speakers of English. In Experiment I, the first three formant values and duration of the four vowels in /hVd/ carrier were measured. The result shows that the high tense vowels have larger F2–F1 values and longer durations than high lax vowels. In Experiment II, each word’s vowel duration was manipulated into the range from 170ms to 290ms in 30ms increments. Two English speakers and six Korean speakers of English were asked to listen to a pair of tense and lax vowel words (e.g., heed_230ms–hid_170ms for the front vowel test and hood_290ms –who’d_200ms for the back vowel test), and to discriminate the pair by choosing one of the options either heed-hid or hidheed for front vowels and either who’d-hood or hood-who’d for back vowels. The results demonstrate that English speakers discriminated tense vowels from lax vowels 100% correctly regardless of the different durations, compared to 62% accuracy rate in Korean speakers of English. Most errors were found when the duration of lax vowels was lengthened and the duration of tense vowels was shortened. Therefore, the results of this study demonstrate that Korean speakers mainly rely on vowel duration as a cue to discriminate the tense and lax vowels. The pedagogical implications of this phenomenon will be discussed.

Assessing more than you teach: the difficult case of transfer

We conducted two case studies to evaluate the effectiveness of individualized remedial reading instruction linked to direct measures of student learning and transfer. The participants were two first grade children at serious risk of reading failure. The instruction targeted decoding of one syllable short vowel words and first emphasized onset-rimes and then phoneme manipulation. Forty words organized into 10 rime patterns were targeted for instruction. Probes consisting of all the instructional words were administered before each instructional session to monitor student progress. We also administered transfer probes to determine if the children could apply their knowledge more broadly. Instruction with onset-rime units yielded excellent maintenance and near transfer (novel words containing instructed rimes) but not far transfer (novel words derived from uninstructed rimes). The instructional change to phoneme manipulation yielded better far transfer for one of the two children. We consider the importance of administering measures that assess more than what is taught to get an accurate portrait of children’s responsiveness to instruction.

Phonetic development of word-initial Korean stops in young Korean children

A number of studies have investigated developmental patterns of stops in various languages through the instrumental analysis; however, very little is known about phonetic characteristics of Korean stops in speech of young Korean children. In Korean, stops are produced at three places of articulation (labial, alveolar, velar); at each place, there is a three-way contrast, yielding nine stops in word-initial position. All stops are voiceless and are differentiated by several acoustic parameters including VOT, f0 of the following vowel, and the amplitude difference of the first and second harmonics (H1−H2) at the voice onset of the following vowel. The present study examines developmental aspects of word-initial Korean stops by measuring values of VOT, f0, and H1−H2 at the onset of the following vowel in words produced by Korean children aged 30, 36, 42, and 48 months. Findings will focus on the phonetic features used by Korean children to contrast the three-way stops and on comparisons between the phonetic patterns of stops produced by Korean children and Korean adults.

An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of some vowels from the annual Christmas broadcasts produced by Queen Elizabeth II over a 50-year period in order to investigate whether adults adapt to sound changes taking place in the community. The sound change that was analyzed in this paper, which is sometimes known as happY-tensing, concerns the tensing of the final vowel in words like ‘happy’ in British English Received Pronunciation over the course of the last 50 years. In the first part of the study, schwa vowels in Christmas broadcasts separated by 40–50 years were analyzed in order to exclude as far as possible any long-term acoustic effects due to vocal tract maturation. The results of this analysis show a large decrease in both the fundamental and F1, F2, and F4 from earlier to later broadcasts. It is then shown that the Queen's 1950s happY vowel is less tense than in a 1980s corpus of four female speakers of Standard Southern British. A subsequent comparison between the 1950s and 1990s Christmas broadcast happY vowels shows a small change towards the tenser position. It is argued that the vowels exemplified by KIT and happY have undergone phonetic raising in RP, with the latter also having fronted. The Queen has participated in the first of these changes and marginally in the second.

‘An inversion of opticks’

SummaryThis paper focuses on the linguistic work of John Gilchrist (1759–1841), one of the first British grammarians to produce a detailed and systematic study of the language known in the 18th century as ‘Hindustani’. An interesting feature of Gilchrist’s grammatical texts is the fact that, within the framework of a grammatical account of a South Asian language, they often include short passages discussing contemporary problems in the analysis of English. In these passages, Gilchrist engages directly with the work of writers such as John Horne Tooke, Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Sheridan, taking up a position in relation to their work and drawing upon his research on Hindustani to support or challenge their analyses of English. In one typical example, discussed in this paper, he mobilises evidence from his own work in support of Thomas Sheridan’s innovative account of the vowel in words such asmineandthine, an analysis that characterises this sound as a diphthong rather than a simple articulation. In the light of Gilchrist’s later visibility as a political radical, some commentators have seen his allusions to Horne Tooke as evidence that his linguistic work has a demonstrably radical character. However, the diversity of the thinkers with whom Gilchrist engages suggests that it is better to interpret his interventions in the analysis of English as attempts to build a reputation as a scholar, not only in the colony but in the metropolis as well. As such, the passages in which Gilchrist discusses the nature of English can be seen as political in the sense that they helped him to find a platform from which he could voice his radical ideas. But they do not always constitute a radical account of the language itself, their importance lying in the opportunities they offered for self-promotion and, indeed, self-transformation.

Principles of Generative Phonology: An Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: Principles of Generative Phonology: An Introduction B. Elan Dresher (bio) John T. Jensen . Principles of Generative Phonology: An IntroductionJohn Benjamins. xii, 324. US $42.95 Principles of Generative Phonology is, as the author writes in the preface, 'a basic, thorough introduction to phonological theory and practice,' intended for undergraduates in a first course in phonology. The emphasis here is on 'introduction'; the book is not, nor is it intended to be, a guide to the leading current issues in phonological theory. Indeed, the author has deliberately chosen to omit a good deal of what contemporary phonologists actually argue about. Thus, the book, though in some ways rather conservative, is at the same time revolutionary in running against recent trends in phonological theory. The first chapter is a compact review of phonetics, the study of the sounds of language. Many introductions to phonology begin with such a review, but this one is uncommonly thorough, presenting the rudiments of articulatory phonetics (how sounds are produced) and acoustic phonetics (the characteristics of sounds and how they are perceived). Special attention is paid to phonetic alphabets, in particular the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Whether the symbol [ü] or [y] is used to represent the front rounded vowel in French rue 'street' is not the sort of issue that may captivate someone interested in the nature of language, but it is just the sort of thing that can be very confusing to beginning students. The book is quite good throughout at anticipating and explaining such potential sources of confusion. The reader unfamiliar with linguistics might well wonder what else there is to phonology once we have described the various sounds used in [End Page 183] speech. As John T. Jensen puts it, 'phonetics is about sounds, while phonology is about the organization of sounds in a linguistic system.' Phonologists are interested in how the sounds of a language pattern, and how they are represented in the mind. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the vowel in words like ride and write. In many dialects of English the vowel in ride is significantly longer than the one in write. In addition, notably in Canadian dialects, the vowel sound in write is higher and more centralized than in ride: this is the so-called 'Canadian Raising' that also affects the vowel in out, as opposed to loud, leading to the misperception on the part of Americans that Canadians pronounce out and about as oot and aboot. These variations in the sound of the vowel are predictable and depend on the character of the following sounds. We conclude that the vowels in ride and write are not two contrasting sounds of English, but rather predictable variants of a single sound. It is this more abstract sound that speakers store in their mental representations of both ride and write. Phonologists disagree about how to account for patterns like these. One school, which continues in the path of Chomsky and Halle's classic Sound Pattern of English (1968), views sounds as being subject to a series of ordered rules that constitute a derivation. In a derivation, the emphasis is on the input to each rule: each rule acts on any input that matches its structural description. Alternatively, we can put the emphasis on the output: rather than a series of ordered rules, we can see phonological representations as being subjected to an array of sometimes conflicting constraints. Phonological theory in the last twenty-five years has struggled to accommodate both derivations and constraints, with some approaches using the two in various combinations, and some theories attempting to give up derivations altogether in favour of constraints acting in parallel. The resulting turmoil in phonological theory has posed a challenge to introductory texts: which approach should take precedence, and how much of each should be presented? Recent texts have followed developments in the field, grafting more and more of the constraint-based approaches onto a derivational core, with mixed results. Jensen's new text aims to present a thorough introduction to 'classical' derivational phonology, the idea being that the basic insights gained from this approach are indispensable to any theory of phonology. What the book gives up in proximity to...

The “Soul” of Language does not use Statistics: Reflections on Vowels and Consonants

This paper reviews studies of language processing with the aim of establishing whether any type of statistical information embedded in linguistic signals can be exploited by the language learner. The constraints as to the information that can be so used, we will argue, should be used to inform theories of language acquisition. We present two experiments with their respective controls. Both show that consonants (Cs) are much more suitable than vowels (Vs) to parse speech streams using statistical dependencies. These experiments use streams composed of items in which statistical information is carried either by the sequence of consonants or by the sequence of vowels. Both kinds of items are simultaneously present is the speech stream but, crucially, their overlap is only partial. Since the location of dips in transitional probabilities (TPs) between adjacent syllables differ for the first and the second type of sequences, we can explore whether consonants and vowels are equally efficient segments to parse signals. Our results show that “consonant words” (CW) are significantly preferred over “vowel words” (VW). We discuss the implication of our results for models of language acquisition.

Talker sex mediates the influence of neighborhood density on vowel articulation

Words with high phonological neighborhood densities (ND) are more difficult to perceive than words with low NDs [P. Luce and D. Pisoni (1998)]. Previous research has shown that the F1/F2 acoustic vowel space is larger for vowels in words with high ND relative to words with low NDs [B. Munson and N.P. Solomon (2004); R. Wright (2004)]. This may represent talkers’ tacit attempts to partially counter the perception difficulties associated with high-ND words. If so, then we would expect to see a larger effect of ND on vowel articulation in women, who have been observed to produce more intelligible speech than men, and to accommodate more to conversational partners than men [V. Hazan and D. Markham (2004); L. Namy et al. (2002)]. This hypothesis was tested by examining the influence of ND on vowel-space articulation by 22 women and 22 men. As expected, women produced overall more-dispersed vowel spaces than men, and vowel spaces associated with high-ND words were more-dispersed than low-ND words. Contrary to expectations, the influence of ND on vowel-space expansion was strongest in men. This appeared to be due a tendency for women not to produce contracted vowel spaces for low-ND words.

Phonological neighborhood density and vowel production in older and younger adults

Recent work has shown that neighborhood density (ND) affects vowel production in young adults (B. Munson and N. Solomon, J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 47, 1048–1058 [2004]). Vowels in words with high ND were produced with larger F1/F2 acoustic vowel space; this effect was independent of word frequency and duration. This may reflect speakers’ modification of vowel production to assist listeners’ vowel perception. However, a post hoc analysis of Munson and Solomon’s data found that the effect is strongest in the low-front vowel /æ/, suggesting that the effect may be due to the ongoing sound change in which /æ/ is progressively becoming lower and more central (Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3099–3111 [1995]) occurring more often in high-density words. If so, one should see a larger effect of neighborhood density in younger adults than in older adults. To examine this, vowel production was measured in a group of ten older adults (mean age=76.1 years), and compared to ten younger adults from Munson and Solomon [2004]. The older adults produced vowels with lower-frequency formants than younger adults. Contrary to expectations, age-group differences were not disproportionately larger for /æ /than for other vowels, and both groups showed a robust effect of neighborhood density on vowel production.