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Investigating the comprehension and perception of reduced speech with pupillary response

  • Author(s) / Creator(s)
  • Spontaneous, casual speech is highly variable, in part due to reduction processes. Listeners handle these reductions in everyday communication; however, these forms present challenges for models of speech perception and lexical processing. Previous research has found that reaction times to reduced word-medial stops are longer, indicating that they are more difficult to process than words with unreduced word-medial stops (Tucker, 2011). The current study examines spoken word processing (as measured by pupil dilation) of reduced and unreduced word-medial stops to determine (a) if the pupillary response to reduced forms corresponds to reaction time results, and (b) when in time any differences emerge. Thirty-nine native speakers of North American English completed a listen-and-repeat task in which 80 isolated disyllabic reduced and unreduced word-medial /d/ and /g/ items (40 of each phoneme) were presented. The pupil size data and speech productions are analyzed and will be reported. The results indicate significantly greater pupil dilation for reduced /d/ and /g/. Words containing /d/ elicited greater dilation than those containing /g/, for reduced and unreduced forms. This suggests that, although word-medial stop reduction is frequent in English, an increased processing load is incurred, mirroring previous reaction time results.

  • Date created
    2019-05-01
  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Type of Item
    Conference/Workshop Poster
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-dyap-1f60
  • License
    Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International