Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation 论文

摘要

Understanding sources of variability in spoken language is one of the most important challenges that face speech researchers today. Traditionally, variability had been treated as noise to be controlled or ignored in studying spoken language; however, there has recently been an increasing interest in exploring lawful variability in spoken language. For example, Byrd (1994b) found that sex and to a lesser degree dialect differences resulted in between-talker differences in the degree of reduction along a number of dimensions including speech rate, stop release, flapping and quantity of central vowels. In addition to inter-talker differences which might be viewed as talker- or group-specific constants, there are many forces that act on spoken language that may change the way a word is pronounced from one utterance to the next by the same talker.