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Phonetic variability of the Spanish alveolar tap: spontaneous production and spoken word recognition
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- Author / Creator
- Perry, Scott J.
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The present dissertation investigated the spontaneous production of the Spanish alveolar tap and how the variability typical of spontaneous speech impacts the process of spoken word recognition. Our corpus analyses found that intervocalic taps vary in duration and intensity due to speech rate and phonetic environment. The intensity drop during taps is also associated with changes in lexical frequency, with higher-frequency words containing taps that are more likely to be reduced. These findings indicate that properties at the word level are related to systematic variation in Spanish tap production, aligning with similar findings in other languages. In the corpus analyses, automated methods did not reliably measure duration, while the same force-aligned boundaries were acceptable for measuring intensity differences. After qualitatively and quantitatively documenting the substantial variability in tap production, we designed an auditory lexical decision experiment to investigate how the reduction of the tap impacts how L1 and L2 Spanish listeners recognize words. In our initial planned analyses, we found that L1 listeners could exploit the advantage of a canonical pronunciation to facilitate recognition accuracy but that no such effect was present for L2 listeners. When we changed our binary reduction variable to a tap-type coding based on previous literature, we saw an inhibitory effect associated with highly reduced perceptual taps. Our exploratory analyses outlined a potential confound between the expected production of the tap for specific words and our variable of interest - reduction. These findings indicate that L1 and L2 listeners recognize words faster when they contain taps that are more typical for that word and that after controlling for this experimentally or statistically, phonetic reduction is an inhibitory factor on spoken word recognition. Taken together, our production and perception data indicate that the variability of Spanish taps is due to lexical and phonetic variables and that word-specific patterns of variability in production shape the process of spoken word recognition regardless of language background.
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2024
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.