Phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization

Georgia Zellou; Rebecca Scarborough; Kuniko Nielsen

doi:10.1121/1.4966232

Phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization

J Acoust Soc Am. 2016 Nov;140(5):3560. doi: 10.1121/1.4966232.

Authors

Georgia Zellou¹, Rebecca Scarborough², Kuniko Nielsen³

Affiliations

¹ Linguistics Department, University of California at Davis, 469 Kerr Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA.
² Linguistics Department, University of Colorado at Boulder, 295 University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
³ Linguistics Department, Oakland, University, 1025 Human Health Building, Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401, USA.

PMID: 27908038
DOI: 10.1121/1.4966232

Abstract

This study investigates the spontaneous phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. Speakers produced monosyllabic words with a vowel-nasal sequence either from dense or sparse phonological neighborhoods in shadowing and word-naming tasks. During shadowing, they were exposed to target words that were modified to have either an artificially increased or decreased degree of coarticulatory vowel nasality. Increased nasality, which is communicatively more facilitative in that it provides robust predictive information about the upcoming nasal segment, was imitated more strongly during shadowing than decreased nasality. An effect of neighborhood density was also observed only in the increased nasality condition, where high neighborhood density words were imitated more robustly in early shadowing repetition. An effect of exposure to decreased nasality was observed during post-shadowing word-naming only. The observed imitation of coarticulatory nasality provides evidence that speakers and listeners are sensitive to the details of coarticulatory realization, and that imitation need not be mediated by abstract phonological representations. Neither a communicative account nor a representational account could single-handedly predict these observed patterns of imitation. As such, it is argued that these findings support both communicative and representational accounts of phonetic imitation.