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Lexical competition within and across regional dialects of American English| old_uid | 11824 |
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| title | Lexical competition within and across regional dialects of American English |
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| start_date | 2012/11/16 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | A |
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| details | Cycle : Sociophonétique |
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| summary | Lexical competition effects are reflected in speech production through the reduction of words with few lexical competitors and the hyperarticulation of words with many competitors. In a series of recent studies, we have explored the interaction between reduction processes and dialect variation in vowel production. The results demonstrate that talkers produce more extreme dialect-specific variants in contexts that promote reduction, suggesting that talkers are more likely to mark social-indexical information on target words that are relatively easy to access. Lexical competition effects are also observed in speech perception tasks, particularly under processing loads due to speed or noise. In a second series of experiments, we have examined the interaction between dialect variation and lexical competition in speech processing. The results reveal larger processing costs due to lexical competition for non-local varieties relative to local, standard varieties across participants, as well as larger lexical competition costs for listeners with exposure to multiple varieties than for listeners with more limited cross-dialect exposure. These results suggest that dialect familiarity has a significant impact on listeners’ ability to reliably encode lexical information in speech processing.
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Bio :
Cynthia G. Clopper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. She received a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from Indiana University. Her major areas of expertise are phonetics, speech perception, sociophonetics, and laboratory phonology. Her primary research interest is the role of variation in spoken language processing. One branch of this research explores the interaction between phonetic reduction, dialect variation, and linguistic sources of variation, such as lexical competition and semantic context, in speech production and perception. The other branch examines listener background, including residential history, native language, and autism, on dialect perception and classification. In collaboration with Judith Tonhauser (The Ohio State University), she is also currently developing an empirically-motivated theory of the prosody-meaning interface based on data from Moroccan Arabic, American English, Paraguayan Guaraní, and K’iche’ Mayan.
Recent publications:
Clopper, C. G. (in press). Effects of dialect variation on the semantic predictability benefit. Language and Cognitive Processes.
Clopper, C. G., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Tamati, T. N. (2010). Lexical neighborhoods and phonological confusability in cross-dialect word recognition in noise. Laboratory Phonology, 1, 65-92.
Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (in press). Perception of dialect variation by young adults with high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Clopper, C. G., & Tonhauser, J. (in press). The prosody of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní. International Journal of American Linguistics. |
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| responsibles | Bel, Welby |
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