LEXICAL CHARACTERISTIC MEDIATE THE INFLUENCE OF SEX AND SEX TYPICALITY ON VOWEL-SPACE SIZE

Benjamin Munson
University of Minnesota

ID 1012
[full paper]

Sex differences in vowel acoustics were found to be mediated by words' frequency of use and phonological neighborhood density. Larger sex differences in vowel-space expansion were found for words with high-frequency of use and words with small phonological neighborhoods than for words than for low-frequency and high density words. Results suggest that talkers' production of social-indexical variants is constrained by the influence these might have on word recognition.