Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech…

Previous research has shown that English infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words by as early as 15-months of age. These results suggest that not only are infants sensitive to large mispronunciations of the vowels in words, but also sensitive to smaller mispronunciations, involving changes to only one dimension of the…