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The Relative Effects of Phonetic and Phonological Salience in Speech Sound Processing a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty Of The Relative Effects of Phonetic and Phonological Salience in Speech Sound Processing A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics By Maya L. Barzilai, M.S. Washington, DC March 5, 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Maya L. Barzilai All Rights Reserved ii The Relative Effects of Phonetic and Phonological Salience in Speech Sound Processing Maya L. Barzilai, M.S. Dissertation Advisors: Elizabeth Zsiga, Ph.D. and Hannah Sande, Ph.D. Abstract This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonolog- ical prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investi- gate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the perception of high versus low tones by speakers of French and Tlı˛cho˛(Dene; Canada). One of the types of sounds examined in each test case is said to be more phonetically salient based on its acoustic properties, and the other is more prominent in the phonological grammar of one of the groups of speakers examined. The test cases are each comprised of an immediate serial recall (ISR) experiment and an artificial language learning (ALL) experiment. Results show that phonetics and phonology are processed differently, supporting the notion that the two represent separate modules in the grammar. Specifically, phonetic effects are more likely to emerge in the ISR tasks, which involve short- term processing, whereas phonological effects tended to emerge in tasks that required longer-term memory and the association of auditory stimuli with lexical meaning. The consistency of phonetic effects in the ISR experiments lends support to the notion of universal acoustic salience, such that a given sound can be easier to process than another sound based solely on their respective acoustic properties. The phonolog- ical effects that emerge in a subset of the results show that this effect of acoustic salience can be outweighed by language-specific grammatical prominence effects, but iii only when the task being performed requires a relatively deeper level of processing. Taken together, these results bolster our understanding of acoustic salience and its universality, and show that a given sound’s role in the phonological patterning in a language can impact the ways in which is processed by speakers of this language. Index words: processing, phonetics, phonology, morphophonology iv Dedication With endless love and gratitude for my third parent, Marcy Pomerance. v Acknowledgments There are so many people without whose help, support, and confidence in me and this project this dissertation would not exist. First and foremost, I am grateful to the participants in the studies that make up this dissertation. Thanks also to Outi Bat-El at Tel Aviv University, as well as to Tammy Steinwand and Tyanna Steinwand in the Tłı˛cho˛ Government and Lucy Lafferty at the Tłı˛cho˛ Community Services Agency, for their support in recruiting participants. I am also grateful to Leslie Saxon for her encouragement throughout the recruitment process, and her thoughtful insights into the results. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my committee for their enthusiastic support of this work. Thanks to Lisa Zsiga for her ability to relate even the smallest details to the bigger picture, and for keeping me focused on the important stuff. I am also deeply grateful to Hannah Sande for being a constant source of optimism and for always reminding me to be fascinated by the data; I am very lucky to have you as a role model. Thanks also to Adam Ussishkin for always providing such thoughtful contributions and encouraging words, even from afar. Together, you have all made this process an unbelievably fulfilling one, and I feel so lucky to call you all mentors. I gratefully acknowledge the funding I received from Georgetown University and the Georgetown GradGov to support the research presented here. I am also very lucky to have completed this dissertation with the help of Georgetown undergraduate students Kiren Chaudry, Emilio Luna, and Ingrid Lillis. This work truly would not vi have gotten done without your contributions, and I am so glad to have worked with each of you as part of this process. I am incredibly fortunate to have gone through graduate school with so many won- derful friends by my side. Thanks to Caroline Kahlenberg for doing this in parallel with me, and for never letting the time differences stop our twice daily phone calls. Seth Jacobs, if every buddy needs a buddy, I’m really lucky to have you as mine. Ross Karlan, thanks for always being ready to offer support, camaraderie, and/or a bagel. To Bertille Baron, a true friend and ideal conference companion, thank you for always being ready to pack your stuff. Amelia Becker, thank you for a friendship that com- bines theory, data, humor, and empathy in perfect proportions. I’m eternally grateful to Nick Osmundson and Andrew Scanlan for providing more emotional support over these years than either of them ever signed on for. Thanks to Shannon Mooney for leading the way, and for being our HQ. Lara Bryfonski, I am so grateful for everything that you’ve taught me as a researcher, a teacher, and a friend. To Lindley Winchester, thank you for telling me in 2015 that I should get a PhD, and for every single moment of friendship ever since. And to Maddie Oakley, I thank statistics every day that we ended up here together — all of this would have been nothing without you. Finally, to my family, thank you for never even questioning whether you believed in me or this project. Ben, thank you for making me laugh harder than anyone else on the planet can; I’m immeasurably lucky that we’re siblings. And to my parents, Mom and Aba, I never could have done any of this without having inherited your nature and received your nurture. vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction.................................1 1.1 Speech Perception and Phonology.................1 1.2 Phonetic vs. Phonological Perception...............6 1.3 Phonetic Salience..........................8 1.4 Remaining Questions........................ 10 1.5 Roadmap.............................. 13 2 Phonetics and Phonology in the Perception of Consonants vs. Vowels. 14 2.1 Background............................. 14 2.2 Consonants and Vowels in Hebrew Orthography......... 20 2.3 Recall Experiment......................... 22 2.4 Artificial Language Experiment.................. 33 2.5 General Discussion......................... 39 3 Phonetics and Phonology in the Perception of Aspirated vs. Unaspirated Stops..................................... 45 3.1 Background............................. 45 3.2 VOT of Spanish Voiceless Stops.................. 48 3.3 Recall Experiment......................... 51 3.4 Artificial Language Experiment.................. 59 3.5 General Discussion......................... 64 4 Phonetics and Phonology in the Perception of High vs. Low Tones... 68 4.1 Background............................. 68 4.2 Phonetics and Phonology of Tłı˛cho˛Low Tones.......... 71 4.3 Recall Experiment......................... 78 4.4 Artificial Language Experiment.................. 84 4.5 General Discussion......................... 92 5 Conclusion.................................. 97 5.1 Task Differences........................... 97 5.2 Phonetics and Phonology in Recall and Word Learning..... 101 5.3 The Processing of Segments, Subsegments, and Suprasegments. 105 5.4 Directions for Future Research................... 107 Bibliography ................................... 109 viii List of Figures 1.1 Model of the bidirectional relationship between phonology and various external forces (Hume and Johnson, 2001) .................3 2.1 Recall scores by L1 and stimulus type.................. 26 2.2 Recall scores by L1 and syllable position................ 28 2.3 ALL scores by L1 and experimental language.............. 36 2.4 Recall scores with individual means by L1 and sequence type..... 43 2.5 ALL scores with individual means by L1 and experimental language. 43 3.1 Mean Spanish VOT (sec) by Place of Articulation........... 50 3.2 Recall scores by L1 and aspiration type................. 56 3.3 Recall scores by L1 and syllable position................ 58 3.4 ALL scores by L1 and aspiration type.................. 62 4.1 Example of pitch on one multimorphemic word in Tłı˛cho˛....... 73 4.2 Example of pitch on one intonational phrase in Tłı˛cho˛......... 74 4.3 Recall scores by L1 and target syllable tone.............. 82 4.4 ALL scores by L1 and target word tone melody............ 87 4.5 Boxplot of ALL scores by L1 and target word tone melody...... 89 ix List of Tables 2.1 Counts of surface consonant and vowels encoded orthographically.. 21 2.2 Mean sequence score (SE) by L1 and stimulus type.......... 25 2.3 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: recall accuracy........ 27 2.4 Mean score (SE) by L1 and experimental language........... 36 2.5 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: ALL accuracy......... 37 3.1 Mean VOT (SE) in ms by L1 and target syllable tone......... 49 3.2 Mixed-effects linear regression model: VOT............... 49 3.3 Mean sequence score (SE) by L1 and target syllable tone....... 55 3.4 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: recall accuracy........ 57 3.5 Mean score (SE) by L1 and aspiration type............... 62 3.6 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: ALL accuracy......... 63 4.1 Mean sequence score (SE) by L1 and target syllable tone....... 82 4.2 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: recall accuracy........ 83 4.3 Mean sequence score (SE) by L1 and target syllable tone....... 87 4.4 Mixed-effects logistic regression model: ALL accuracy......... 88 x Chapter 1 Introduction The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relative effects of phonetic and phonological salience in speech sound processing. It is clear that speech perception is impacted by the abstract phonological patterning of a listener’s language (e.g., Werker et al., 1981; Werker and Tees, 1984a,b; Hume and Johnson, 2001).
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