De scriptions of lenition have often assumed that connected speech reductions are the phonetic precursors of phonological lenition processes. In this article, production of intervocalic voiced stops during reading in American English is examined to determine whether connected speech reduction processes mirror the stages of lenition that have been posited in the phonological literature. The first result shows that American English speakers never lenite to fricatives or debuccalize to [h] or glottal stop, but rather produce approximants whenever reduction occurs. Second, stress plays an essential role: 51% of stops are produced as approximants when stress is on the preceding syllable (e.g. ‘yoga'), but only 7% of stops weaken when stress is on the following syllable (e.g. ‘lagoon'). Approximant productions are longer and higher in intensity than stop productions when stress precedes the target consonant, but when stress follows the target consonant, the stop cues are enhanced. These acoustic findings suggest that English speakers prioritize the realization of acoustic cues to stress, including the robust production of stop consonants, over pressures to reduce or weaken consonants in intervocalic position.

Previous literature on gay(-sounding) speech has shown that gay men tend to produce longer /s/ tokens with higher spectral centers of gravity (Munson & Babel (2010), Levon (2006, 2007), and Linville (1998)). The existing body of work, however, has only shown this difference using word-initial, non-cluster /s/ tokens or aggregate average values across all contexts. This study specifically investigates these questions in /sC/ clusters, both word-initally and -finally. Participants produced words in a carrier phrase containing either /s/ or an /s/-stop cluster, in either word-initial or word-final position (N = 16). To control for speech rate variation, /s/ tokens were measured with respect to participants’ syllable length. Preliminary findings show that gay speakers did in fact lengthen /s/ tokens in all contexts, at similar rates across cluster and singleton contexts. Significant differences between gay and straight men were found for both /s/-to-syllable ratio and spectral center of gravity at /s/ midpoints. These findings contribute to the depth of gay speech acoustics research and provide a basis for context-specific sociophonetic perceptual studies.

Previous perceptual research demonstrates that providing listeners with a social prime, such as information about a speaker's gender, can affect how listeners categorize an ambiguous speech sound produced by that speaker. We report the results of an experiment testing whether, in turn, providing listeners with a linguistic prime, such as which word they are about to hear, affects categorization of that speaker's gender. In an eye-tracking study testing for these bidirectional effects, participants (i) saw a visual prime (gender or lexical), (ii) heard an auditory stimulus drawn from a matrix of gender (female-to-male) and sibilant frequency (shack-to-sack) continua, and (iii) looked to images of the non-primed category. Social prime results replicate earlier findings that listeners’ /s-ʃ/ boundary can shift via visual gender information. Additionally, lexical prime results indicate that listeners’ judgments of speaker gender can shift with visual linguistic information. These effects are strongest for listeners at category boundaries where linguistic and social information are least prototypical. In regions of high linguistic and social prototypicality, priming effects are weakened or reversed. The results provide evidence of a bidirectional link between social and linguistic categorization in speech perception and its modulation by the stimulus prototypicality.

Malayalam (Dravidian) has been described as having seven contrastive nasal places of articulation: labial, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, and a “seventh nasal,” sometimes called palatal-velar /ŋj/ (Asher & Kumari 1997; Namboodiripad & Garellek 2017). Nasal inventories of this size are cross-linguistically rare, and the palatal-velar nasal has only been proposed in a handful of languages worldwide (e.g., Irish, Yanyuwa, and Awngi). Indeed, its status in Malayalam could be deemed peripheral; it is infrequent and occurs in limited phonological contexts. Namboodiripad & Garellek (2017) claim that, though several consonants undergo palatalization in Malayalam, this palatal-velar nasal is dynamically stable and not post-palatalized. Although it is distinct in format transitions from the non-palatalized velar nasal, the articulatory basis for the distinction between this palatal-velar nasal and a velar-glide cluster is not clear. The present study uses ultrasound imaging to determine if this seventh nasal is in fact dynamically stable. Ultrasound data were collected from one native speaker of Malayalam; the placement and timing of lingual contact with the palate were examined. Discussion will focus on how the palatal-velar differs in terms of place and timing of articulations from both palatal and velar nasals, as well as from other palatalized consonants.

Afrikaans plosives are traditionally described as contrasting in voicing ([b d] vs. [p t]). Coetzee et al. (2014, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135, 2421), however, showed that the voicing contrast is collapsing word-initially, with voiced plosives merging with voiceless plosives. They also found that voicing loss does not result in loss of lexical contrast, which is preserved on the following vowel (high f0 after historically voiceless and low f0 after historically voiced plosives). That study investigated word-initial plosives, leaving unanswered whether word-medial plosives are also devoicing. The current study addresses this question. Acoustic analysis of data collected from nine Afrikaans speakers replicated the results of Coetzee et al. for word-initial plosives. For word-medial plosives, a robust voicing contrast was found along with a post-plosive f0 difference. The f0 difference in medial position was comparable to that in initial position in both magnitude and duration, and extended throughout the vowel. While lexical contrasts are hence cued by only f0 word initially, they are differentiated by both plosive voicing and the f0 of the following vowel word medially. The relevance of these results for theories of sound change and theories of phonological contrast will be discussed. [Work supported by NSF.]