Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Concludes that a significantly higher proportion of a word was needed by all adult ESL students to identify low-frequency words than high-frequency words, and a significant difference existed in the proportion of a word needed by all subjects for identification in poor, moderate, and rich contexts. (FL)