This dissertation investigates how the abstract representation of vowels affects spoken word recognition in Brazilian Portuguese and American English by examining two issues in theoretical phonology and speech processing: underspecification theory, and underlying representation when there is alternation. Three experiments were conducted in…

This dissertation examined two phonological and morphological changes in Ghamdi Arabic (GA), focusing on vowel harmony and gender distinctions. By comparing Prochazka's 1988 findings with recent data from 26 participants across two age groups. Participants consisted of 20 younger speakers (10 males and 10 females, ages 20 to 35) and six older…

This dissertation examines whether EFL and ESL Korean learners of English are able to produce and perceive two English phonological contrasts that depend on vowel duration differences, coda consonant voicing contrasts and the tense-lax distinction in vowels. For production, it examines differences in vowel duration and vowel quality associated…

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)--also known as vowel devoicing--in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is…

Although second language (L2) learners often have difficulty with learning the L2 pronunciation, the literature has reported a mix of more successful and less successful learners. Many factors could contribute to individual variation in L2 speech sound learning. This dissertation examines a few factors that are hypothesized to influence L2…

The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the targets of vowels in speech production. Three experiments investigate vowel production in non-native speech, probing how new vowel categories, and thus targets, are formed. Three research questions are addressed: (1) Do vowels have articulatory targets (as predicted by Browman &…

Previous studies on second language (L2) phonetic acquisition in early bilingual learners have mainly examined immigrants to the L2 country; however, with recent growing dual-language immersion programs, the immersed bilingual group emerged and required more attention in the research. This study aims to investigate vowel patterns of young…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

The current study explored individual differences in sensitivity to sub-phonemic variation of acoustic cues in the perception of a native language (L1) category in order to test the hypothesis that second language (L2) learners' different sensitivity to the L2-relevant acoustic dimension in L1 perception could explain individual variability in…

This dissertation investigates the relationship between ethnicity and place among 44 young adult Latino English speakers in the state of Georgia using a mixed-methods approach. While varieties of Latino English have been studied in traditional destination communities (TDCs) like Texas, California, or New York, where the Latino populations are…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to…

Decades of research have established effective curricula for struggling readers. In the digital age, educational technologies expand access to apps and resources to supplement classroom instruction, but most lack scientific backing. "Sound it Out," a collaborative effort between reading researchers and technology developers, aims to…

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant ("good") and task-relevant ("bad") parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token…

In this dissertation, I investigate the phonological behavior of Bavarian German liquids, nasals, and vowels. These sounds undergo various changes, depending on the context, and I examine these changes in terms of features, which are determined via a contrastive hierarchy. This dissertation departs from traditional studies on German dialects,…