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ERIC Number: ED669326
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 192
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: 979-8-4604-4815-9
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Forms and Function of Clear Speech
Tifani Biro
ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University
During conversation, talkers may adapt their speech in a variety of ways. One form of speech adaptation is clear speech, in which a talker selectively hyperarticulates segments when faced with specific communication challenges. The present speech production experiment investigated how talkers adapt a common feature of American English dialects: intervocalic /t/ is realized as a voiced flap rather than an unvoiced stop before unstressed syllables, causing words like petal and pedal to sound similar. Using a faux-computer training paradigm, participants were provided with artificial feedback on their speech. When subjects said a word (e.g., "petal") the computer would either interpret the word correctly (i.e., it guesses "petal") or incorrectly (it guesses "pedal," "kettle" or ???). Talkers' word length, initial-syllable vowel length, and medial consonant stop closure or flap consonant duration produced preceding and following feedback was measured. Participants produced longer words, vowels, and stop closure durations in response to feedback that contained an error compared to correct feedback. Participants also changed their flapped productions to stops most often and lengthened their stop consonant closures to a greater degree following voicing errors compared to the other error conditions. These findings indicate that interlocutors' productions change along different acoustic dimensions depending on the kind of miscommunication they experience. Next, how listener perception is influenced by talker acoustic and articulatory change, by itself (Perception Experiment 1), and in response to feedback (Perception Experiment 2) was investigated. Both perception experiments had a similar design. Listeners heard talkers' productions from the previous production experiment and had to select what word they heard from a choice of two written words on a screen. Overall, Perception Experiment 1 revealed that listener perception was better for lengthened productions compared to shortened and stops better than flaps. However, listeners perception was hindered by talkers' lengthening of their closure durations for /d/, suggesting that not all changes talkers make in response to miscommunication aid listeners in perceiving their speech. Perception Experiment 2 revealed that the production changes talkers made following a misrecognition of medial /t/ aided listener perception. Yet, these findings did not extend to the adjustments talkers made for medial /d/. These findings suggest that talker adjustments made to remedy a voicing misrecognition do not universally aid listener's perception of voiced and voiceless medial consonants. Broadly, these findings highlight a need to consider how phonetic adaptation among interlocutors is affected by the nature of miscommunication in conversational interaction. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
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Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses - Doctoral Dissertations
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A