Lexical effects in the perception and production of American English /p/ allophones.
| Number | 1072 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1997 |
| Drawer | 20 |
| Entry Date | 06/29/1998 |
| Authors | Whalen, D.H., Best, Catherine T., and Irwin, Julia R. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Jorunal of Phonetics, 25, 1997, 501-528. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1072.pdf |
| Abstract | Although modern theories of phonology tend not to include the phoneme as theoretical object, positional variants, traditionally known as allophones, clearly play a role in language. In English, medial voiceless stops typically occur with aspiration in stressed syllables but without aspiration in unstressed ones. In the experiments reported here, the aspirated and unaspirated allophones of /p/ were studied both for discriminability and for perceptual preference in appropriate and inappropriate stress contexts in the second syllable of disyllabic targets. In tests with non-words, aspirated [p] was consistently preferred without regard to which syllable was stressed. Additionally, the unaspirated stop was somewhat more difficult to discriminate from the other allophones in a categorical AXB task than the aspirate was. When subjects were asked to repeat and imitate both varieties, nonetheless, they were usually able to mimic the inappropriate allophones. In real words, however, subjects did generally prefer the correct allophone perceptually, and they found the inappropriate ones difficult to imitate. The allophonic contrast, then, may require contact with the lexicon in order to affect production and perception, a finding that needs to be explicitly accounted for in phonology. |
| Notes |
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