The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

The core objective of this study was to examine whether acoustic variability of vowel production in American English, across speaking tasks, is systematic. Ten male speakers who spoke a relatively homogeneous Wisconsin dialect produced eight monophthong vowels (in hVd and CVC contexts) in four speaking tasks, including clear-speech, citation form,…

Function (i.e., grammatical) words very frequently lack word-level stress and display phonetic reduction relative to content (i.e., lexical) words. However, word-class (function vs . content) may not be the only factor that affects phonetic realization of function words; prosodic and syntactic context can also play a significant role in…

To what extent does language acquisition recruit domain-general processing mechanisms? In this dissertation, evidence concerning this question is garnered from the study of individual differences in infant speech perception and their predictive value with respect to language development in early childhood. In the first experiment, variation in the…

This collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Initial Tones and Prominence in Seoul Korean" (Ken de Jong); "The Domains of Laryngeal Feature Lenition Effects in Chonnam Korean" (Sun-Ah Jun); "The Timing of Lip Rounding and Tongue Backing for /u/" Gina M. Lee); "Prosody and Intrasyllabic Timing in…

Reports of research in phonetics and psycholinguistics include: "Interaction with Autonomy: Defining Multiple Output Models in Psycholinguistic Theories" (Julie E. Boland, Anne Cutler); "Vocal Tract Evolution and Vowel Production" (K. Bretonnel Cohen); "Final Lowering in Kipare" (Rebecca Herman); "Gestural…