
Title: The production and perception of morphologically and grammatically conditioned phonetic detail
Author: Baker, R.
Awarding Body: University of Cambridge
Current Institution: University of Cambridge
Date of Award: 2008
Availability of Full Text:
Full text unavailable from EThOS.
Please contact the current institution’s library for further details.
This thesis investigates morphologically and grammatically fine phonetic detail in speech production and perception. The experiments in this thesis test the hypothesis that morphologically and grammatically driven phonetic detail is systematic and provides useful information during perception. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words; prefixed words are semantically related to a base word but pseudo-prefixed words are not, e.g. mistimes vs. mistakes. Chapter 2 documents acoustic phonetic differences between prefixes and pseudo-prefixes and Chapter 3 reports an intelligibility-in-noise experiment demonstrating the perceptual salience of these differences.  Chapters 4 and 5 investigate function words. Chapter 4 reports an intelligibility-in-noise experiment that reveals perceptual sensitivity to phonetic differences between function words and comparable content words, e.g. she’s vs. banshees. This perceptual sensitivity affects the identification of content words but not function words. Chapter 5 presents a production study that examines the role of neighbourhood density, frequency and contextual probability in the phonetic realisation of a set of six contracted auxiliaries (I’d, you’d, he’d, she’d, we’d, they’d). Acoustic analyses show that contextual probability is related to phonetic realisation and that a redefined concept of neighbourhood density can also explain the specific phonetic behaviour in each contracted auxiliary. Chapter 6 discusses all the experimental results in terms of the importance of integrating phonetic, grammatical and psycholinguistic approaches in order to understand the production and perception of words with special grammatical or morphological status.
Supervisor: Not available Sponsor: Not available
Qualification Name: Thesis (Ph.D.) Qualification Level: Doctoral
EThOS ID:  DOI: Not available