Presenter(s): Cydnie Davenport
Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk
Oral Session 1 SW
Recent research (e.g., Dilley & Pitt, 2010) has demonstrated that manipulation of speech rate influences listeners’ perception of syllables in English. For example, when a sentence like “Don must see the harbor or boats” is spoken quickly, the portion “harbor or” can blend together, creating an utterance that is ambiguous with a sentence like “Don must see the harbor boats.” Slowing down the surrounding speech rate can cause a listener’s perception of the sentence to switch from the harbor or boats version to the harbor boats version. When listeners hear a slower speaking rate, they expect to hear fewer words than when they hear a faster rate, an effect described as the “context speech rate effect.” This behavior has only been investigated in “standard” American English, not in dialects that may differ in terms of their pronunciation and how they can be perceived. Research has also not yet considered how social context influences this effect. This project asked how various dialects of American English impact spoken word segmentation. This is critically important because dialect information in someone’s speech can result in both social judgments, and can significantly impact how speech is understood. By investigating how various dialects interact with cognitive mechanisms like this context speech rate effect, we also raise the question of how social and cognitive factors interact during human communication.