The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the mechanisms involved in phonetic learning of an unfamiliar accent, focusing on understanding what processes underlie changes to phonetic category structure, how such learning affects subsequent online lexical processing, and whether the same mechanisms that underlie learning for a single speaker…

This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

All language use reflects the user's social identity in systematic ways. While humans can easily adapt to this sociolinguistic variation, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems continue to struggle with it. This dissertation makes three main contributions. The first is to provide evidence that modern state-of-the-art commercial ASR systems…

The present study investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) Chinese categorization of tones and segments and use of tones and segments in lexical access. Previous research has shown that English listeners rely more on pitch height than pitch direction when perceiving lexical tones; however, it remains unclear if this superior use…

The information visualization pipeline serves as a lossy communication channel for presentation of data on a screen-space of limited resolution. The lossy communication is not just a machine-only phenomenon due to information loss caused by translation of data, but also a reflection of the degree to which the human user can comprehend visual…

This dissertation begins with the observation of a typological asymmetry within phonological patterns related to phonetic naturalness. Patterns that are rooted within existing tendencies of perception and/or production--in other words, patterns that are phonetically "natural"--are common in phonological typology and seen in a variety of…

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when factoring out speaker characteristics such as sex, age, dialect, and so on. Some speakers share common features and can cohere into groups based on gross vocal similarity but, to date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based…

This dissertation investigates the hypothesis that the more vowel-like a consonant is, the more difficult it is for listeners to classify it as geminate or singleton. A perceptual account of this observation holds that more vowel-like consonants lack clear markers to signal the beginning and ending of the consonant, so listeners don't perceive the…

The emergence of visual media as prominent and even expected forms of communication in nearly all disciplines, including those scientific, has raised new questions about how the art and science of communication epistemologically affect the interpretation of scientific phenomena. In this dissertation I explore how the influence of aesthetics in…

This study investigated English speakers' perception of Mandarin sounds, aiming to answer three major questions. First, does the perceived similarity between Mandarin and English sounds affect learners' acquisition of Mandarin sounds? Second, do the groups with different amounts of Mandarin experience differ in their perception of…

Psychoeducational assessment, and specifically cognitive testing, is important to the role of school psychologists; however, the utility of such testing has been called into question, and its future is unclear. Researchers are divided into two camps. One side grew disenchanted with cognitive testing after the failure of the discrepancy method to…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…