Phonological neighborhood density is known to influence lexical access, speech production as well as perception processes. Lexical competition is thought to be the central concept from which the neighborhood effect emanates: highly competitive neighborhoods are characterized by large degrees of phonemic co-activation, which can delay speech recognition and facilitate speech production. The present study investigates phonetic learning in English as a foreign language in relation to phonological neighborhood density and onset density to see whether dense or sparse neighborhoods are more conducive to the incorporation of novel phonetic detail. In addition, the effect of voice-contrasted minimal pairs (bat-pat) is explored. Results indicate that sparser neighborhoods with weaker lexical competition provide the most optimal phonological environment for phonetic learning. Moreover, novel phonetic details are incorporated faster in neighborhoods without minimal pairs. Results indicate that lexical competition plays a role in the dissemination of phonetic updates in the lexicon of foreign language learners.
German has various homophonous sibilant fricatives of phonemic or morphemic nature that can appear in word-final position. In English, the functional status of a word-final \s\ influences its durational properties, with phonemic \s\ being longer than morphemic types. The data set presented here is a small selection of laboratory-elicited German sentences containing various words with final sibilant phonemes (e.g., "das Haus") and morphemes (plural, genitive, clitic, inflection). Durations of the \s\ types were measured and compared across the conditions. An ANOVA between the \s\ types and post-hoc Tukey pair-wise comparisons are presented that show various significant differences.
The submission consists of a csv data file, containing a number of variables, and a PDF document detailing the experiment and variables.
National Research Foundation of Korea@@NRF-2018S1A5A8028985@@Assessing morpho-phonological sensitivity in Korean learners of Germanic languages@@Other@@✖[remove]2