This study reports equivalence in recognition for variable productions of spoken words that differ greatly in frequency. General American (GA) listeners participated in either a semantic priming or a false-memory task, each with three talkers with different accents: GA, New York City (NYC), and Southern Standard British English (BE). GA/BE induced strong semantic priming and low false recall rates. NYC induced no semantic priming but high false recall rates. These results challenge current theory and illuminate encoding-based differences sensitive to phonetically-cued talker variation. The findings highlight the central role of phonetic variation in the spoken word recognition process.

Voiced obstruents have inherent susceptibility for devoicing due to the Aerodynamic Voicing Constraints (AVC), and the susceptibility is higher for geminate obstruents than singletons. As a way to investigate how Japanese speakers realize the contrast between the [ + /-voice] contrast in obstruents, we examined oral and nasal airflow patterns during intervocalic voiced and voiceless stops, in singletons and geminates. The results showed asymmetry between single and geminate stops in realization of the stop voicing contrast. Airflow pattern clearly differentiates voiced vs. voiceless contrast in singletons, but the airflow patterns are similar in geminates. Acoustic signals also shows the same asymmetry between the singletons and geminates. The observed convergence—clear voicing contrast in singletons vs. the lack of the contrast in geminates both in air flow and acoustic signals indicate neutralization of the voiced geminates into voiceless ones. Our results support the idea of phonetic bases in phonological patterning of voicing neutralization in Japanese geminate stops.

The effects of phoneme frequency on stop place perception were examined. In English, [t] is more frequently observed than [k] while the opposite is true in Japanese. If the sound frequency affects the phoneme perception, English listeners would identify more of the ambiguous [t]-[k] stimuli as “t” than do Japanese listeners. In this study, a 4IAX discrimination experiment and a phoneme boundary decision experiment were conducted with English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners to test this hypothesis. The stimuli of the two experiments were created by the Klatt synthesizer. [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were recorded by a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker, respectively. Then, [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were synthesized based on the parameter values obtained from the measurements of the recorded tokens. They were used as the end-point tokens of a nine-step continuum. The rest of the tokens were created by manipulating frequency parameters of the synthesizer. Four sets of [k]-[t] continua were created (two languages: English and Japanese, and two vowel conditions: [a] and [o]). A preliminary analysis of a subset of data demonstrated that the more frequent sound in each language occupied a larger perceptual region of the [a] vowel continua.

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A rare case of papillary cystadenocarcinoma of the sublingual gland was immunohistochemically studied. Regional lymph node metastasis was present at the time of diagnosis. Histologically, the tumor showed an invasive, cystic growth pattern and had a conspicuous papillary component. The predominant cell type of the tumor was a combination of tall columnar and large cuboidal cells. Immunohistochemical analysis indicated higher labelling indices of CD34 (31.9%) and Ki67 (40.1%) as compared with adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC). Cyclooxygenase-2 expression was similar to that of ACC. These findings suggested a characteristic high-grade malignancy that required close follow-up.