The influence of production latencies and phonological neighborhood density on vowel dispersion

Abstract

This paper reports preliminary results from a study on the influence of planning processes on variability in the acoustic characteristics of vowels. Twelve speakers produced multiple tokens of words varying in phonological neighborhood density (PND). As in previous research, vowels in words with high PND were produced closer to the periphery of the acoustic vowel space than were vowels in low PND words. Response latencies predicted the degree of hyperarticulation in an experimental condition in which these latencies were thought to reflect the extent of coactivation of phonologically similar words, but not in a condition in which this coactivation was presumed to have attenuated. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.