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This study examines the effects of different listener-oriented speaking styles and semantic contexts on online spoken word recognition using eyetracking. In Experiment 1, different groups of listeners participated in a word-identification-in-noise and in a pleasantness-rating task. Listeners heard sentences with high- versus low-predictability semantic contexts produced in infant-directed speech, Clear Speech, and Conversational Speech. Experiment 2 (in silence) and 3 (in noise) investigated the time course of visual fixations to target objects when participants were listening to different speaking styles and contexts. Results from all experiments show that relative to conversational speech, both infant-directed speech and Clear Speech improved word recognition for high-predictability sentences, in quiet as well as in noise. This indicates that established advantages of infant-directed speech for young listeners cannot be attributed only to affect; the acoustic enhancements in infant-directed speech benefit adult speech processing as well. Furthermore, in silence (Experiment 2) lexical access was facilitated by contextual cues even in conversational speech; but in noise (Experiment 3) listeners reliably focused the target only when a combination of contextual cues and listener-adapted acoustic–phonetic cues were available. These findings suggest that both semantic cues and listener-oriented acoustic enhancements are needed to facilitate word recognition, especially in adverse listening conditions.

The goal of the current study was to explore the temporal organization of six regional dialects of American English to gain a better understanding of the perceptual impressions of speaking rate variation. The study further examines whether regional dialects form different groupings based on their segmental vs. global temporal characteristics. Acoustic measures included articulation rate, pause frequency and duration, and vowel and consonant duration variability. The results revealed that Southern American English is characterized by a slow overall articulation rate, long pauses, and highly variable syllable-to-syllable vowel durations, whereas the New England dialect is characterized by a fast overall articulation rate, short pauses, and highly variable syllable-to-syllable consonant durations. The patterns for the other dialects are more mixed: the Northern and Western dialects are characterized by low variability vowel durations, the Midland dialect shares a slow articulation rate with the Southern dialect, and the Mid-Atlantic dialect exhibits no unique temporal properties among those examined. Thus, temporal variation in regional dialects of American English is orthogonal to vowel variation, in which New England, Midland, and Western dialects are often characterized together as “General American”. Taken together, the results are consistent with the stereotype that Southerners talk slowly and Northerners talk quickly and suggest that pausing and segmental duration variability may contribute to the perceived speaking rate differences.

While cross-dialect prosodic variation has been well established for many languages, most variationist research on regional dialects of American English has focused on the vowel system. The current study was designed to explore prosodic variation in read speech in two regional varieties of American English: Southern and Midland. Prosodic dialect variation was analyzed in two domains: speaking rate and the phonetic expression of pitch movements associated with accented and phrase-final syllables. The results revealed significant effects of regional dialect on the distributions of pauses, pitch accents, and phrasal-boundary tone combinations. Significant effects of talker gender were also observed on the distributions of pitch accents and phrasal-boundary tone combinations. The findings from this study demonstrate that regional and gender identity features are encoded in part through prosody, and provide further motivation for the close examination of prosodic patterns across regional and social varieties of American English.

The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. In Experiment 2, an independent group of native English listeners sorted the group of 17 languages in terms of their distance from English. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with four groups of non-native English listeners: Dutch, Mandarin, Turkish and Korean listeners. Taken together, the results of these three experiments represent a step towards establishing an approach to assess the overall phonetic similarity of languages. This approach could potentially provide the basis for developing predictions regarding foreign-accented speech intelligibility for various listener groups, and regarding speech perception accuracy in the context of background noise in various languages.