Dimensions of similarity in the mental lexicon

Abstract

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remains unanswered. In the present study, we reanalyze phonetic data from a previous study, examining the contrasting predictions of different definitions of phonological similarity. Our results suggest that similarity at the level of position-specific phonological segments best predicts the influence of neighbor activation on phonetic properties of initial consonants.

Dynamically adapted context-specific hyper-articulation: Feedback from interlocutors affects speakers’ subsequent pronunciations

“…Moreover, producing these sequences is associated with increased rates of speech errors (O’Seaghdha & Marin, 2000; Sevald & Dell, 1994), longer production latencies, and slowed down speech rates (for review, see Jaeger, Furth, & Hilliard, 2012a). Increased competition is assumed to result in hyper-articulation, offering a potential explanation for Competitor effects, such as the ones observed here and in similar previous studies (Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009; Goldrick et al, 2013; Kirov & Wilson, 2013; see also Fox, Reilly, & Blumstein, 2015; Fricke, Baese-Berk, & Goldrick, 2016; Peramunage, Blumstein, Myers, Goldrick, & Baese-Berk, 2011). …”

The phonetic specificity of competition: Contrastive hyperarticulation of voice onset time in conversational English

“…A number of experimental and observational studies have reported that competition at the lexical level is correlated with hyperarticulation of phonetic properties in the target word. This correlation has been reported for English in a number of studies investigating the realization of vowel formants (e.g., Wright, 1997;2004;Munson & Solomon, 2004;Munson, 2007;Scarborough, 2012), vowel durations (Schertz, 2013;Seyfarth, Buz, & Jaeger, 2016; but see Goldrick, Vaughn, & Murphy, 2013), degree of coarticulation (Scarborough, 2012(Scarborough, , 2013, perseveration of voicing in coda fricatives (Seyfarth et al, 2016;Kharlamov, 2014), and initial stop voice onset time (Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009;Peramunage et al, 2011;Kirov & Wilson, 2012;Schertz, 2013;Fricke, 2013;Buz, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2016;Fox, Reilly, & Blumstein, 2015;Fricke, Baese-Berk, & Goldrick, 2016). In each of these cases, some form of lexical competition has been found to correlate with hyperarticulation of phonetic properties of individual segments (e.g., Wright, 2004;Fricke, 2013;; but see Goldrick et al, 2013;Gahl, 2015).…”

“…For example, Fricke's (2013) Articulate As Soon As Possible Principle (AASAPP) posits that articulation unfolds on a segment-by-segment basis, and begins as soon as competition in a given segmental position is resolved. According to this model, the relative position of difference between the target and its competitors is therefore of paramount importance, but the phonetic relationships among those competitors is not relevant -a greater number of competitors defined for a particular segmental position leads to increased activation of the target segment regardless of phonetic relationship (Fricke, 2013; see also Vitevitch, Ambrüster, & Chu, 2004;Fricke et al, 2016). In contrast, both communicative and listenerinternal accounts are based on perceptual confusability, such that hyperarticulation is targeted to those cues that maximize perceptual distinctiveness between competitors.…”

“…Fox et al (2015) reported that phonetically specific minimal pair existence did not significantly predict voice onset time realizations in word list and sentence reading tasks, while neighborhood density did. Fricke (2013) and Fricke, Baese-Berk, and Goldrick (2016) reported that hyperarticulation of word-initial voice onset time is most robustly predicted by the number of competitors in the onset position. Fricke and colleagues argued that both cue-specific minimal pair competition and more general neighborhood density correlate with hyperarticulation of word-initial voice onset time because they also correlate with this positionbased measure (see also Caselli, Caselli, &Cohen-Goldberg, 2015, andVitevitch et al, 2004).…”

“…These three neighborhood densities targeted the first segmental position, the second segmental position, and the rest of the word (from the third segment to the last segment). We chose to include a metric for competition in the onset position because competition in this position has been found to be predictive in a number of studies (Vitevitch et al, 2004;Goldrick et al, 2010;Fricke, 2013;Caselli et al, 2015;Fricke et al, 2016). We included a metric for competition in the second segment because, as stop bursts often contain cues to the formants of following sonorants (Suchato & Punyabukkana 2005), hyperarticulation of bursts might arise when there are many competitors in the following segment.…”