INHIBITION OF PROCESSING DUE TO REDUCTION OF THE AMERICAN ENGLISH FLAP

Benjamin V. Tucker & Natasha Warner
University of Arizona

ID 1493
[full paper]

The speech we encounter in daily life casual conversation often contains impoverished or reduced acoustic information, in comparison to careful speech, and yet listeners can understand such speech with ease. This study explores differences in processing between reduced/ conversational speech and unreduced/careful speech. In a cross-modal identity priming experiment, listeners heard reduced vs. careful pronunciations of real words and then saw visual stimuli and decided whether the visual stimulus was a real word. This experiment investigates processing differences between reduced and unreduced speech using the American English flapped /d/ and word-medial /g/. American English listeners are shown to process unreduced (clear) targets more quickly than reduced targets.