Vowel reduction and the perception of words

• This study deals with listeners' ability to identify linguistic units from linguistically incomplete stimuli and relates this to the potentiality of vowel reduction in a word. Synthetic speech was used to produce stimuli that were similar to real words, but where the vowel in the pre-stress syllable was excluded. Listeners then performed a lexical decision test, where they had to decide whether a stimulus sounded like a word or not. The effects of the identity of the removed vowel and of features of the consonants adjacent to the removed vowel were then examined. For type of vowel, lower word rates where found for words with the vowels /a/ and /o/, whereas words with nasals after the reduced vowel tended to result in higher word rates.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

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