Taehong Cho

This study explores prosodically driven perceptual adjustment of a non-contrastive coarticulatory feature. Specifically, it examines how prosodic prominence and information structure influence the perception of anticipatory vowel nasalization in CVN in American English as a cue to an upcoming nasal consonant. Using a two-alternative forced-choice task, we tested whether the same acoustic degree of nasalization is interpreted differently depending on prosodic and information-structural contexts, and whether these effects are consistent across native English speakers and Korean learners of English. Listeners identified target words ( Bob or bomb ) from a nasalization continuum embedded in carrier sentences (“(No,) Riley wrote Bob/bomb slowly”), where the coda consonant was masked by noise. Prosodic prominence was manipulated by adjusting pitch and amplitude of surrounding words while keeping the target constant; and information structure was manipulated by including or omitting No , signaling contrastive focus. For a given stimulus, listeners gave more nasal responses ( bomb ) when the target was prosodically prominent or preceded by No , implying that they compensate for reduced vowel nasality in these contexts. The fact that No influenced perception independent of prosody suggests that information structure can modulate perceptual compensation beyond acoustic-prosodic cues, reflecting a top-down effect of discourse meaning. Finally, although Korean listeners gave fewer nasal responses overall—possibly due to reliance on acoustic detail or perceptual hypercorrection—both groups showed similar sensitivity to prosodic and information-structural cues. These findings taken together point toward a shared perceptual mechanism in both native and non-native perception that integrates fine-grained phonetic detail with prosodic and information-structural contexts.

Speech perception relies on multiple acoustic cues whose relative weighting varies across languages. The present study examines how long-term language experience shapes cue weighting in second-language (L2) speech perception, refining an attentional-learning account of cross-linguistic transfer. Native speakers of English, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, and Mandarin completed a cue-weighting task targeting English lexical stress, in which vowel quality, pitch, and duration were orthogonally manipulated. Results revealed robust, dimension-specific differences across first-language (L1) groups that could not be explained solely by the presence or absence of lexical stress or lexical tone in the L1. Instead, cue weighting reflected how acoustic dimensions function within the L1 cue ecology, including their relative contribution to lexical distinctions and the stability and interpretability of these mappings across contexts. Cue redundancy constrained relative cue strength without eliminating attentional sensitivity to secondary dimensions. Machine-learning classification further showed that L1-linked attentional profiles were sufficiently structured to support prediction, even among L2 listeners with substantial English proficiency, demonstrating the persistence of L1-shaped attentional tuning. These findings support a view of cue weighting as reflecting durable, multidimensional attentional priors shaped by long-term experience and highlight the importance of L1 cue ecologies in understanding cross-linguistic transfer in speech perception.

Vowel glottalization, as voice quality variation, occurs at phrase edges or under prominence, often in conjunction with resolving onsetless syllables or vowel-vowel hiatus. This study examines whether and how voice quality in two varieties of English, American and Australian, is manifested at phrase edges and under prominence in vowels that are neither strictly initial nor final. Analyses of spectral and noise measures show that both varieties utilize voice quality to signal prominence and boundaries, even in non-edge contexts. Specifically, increased glottalization reflects stronger laryngeal articulation in line with domain-initial and prominence-induced strengthening. Conversely, phrase-final positions are characterized by phrase-final creak, which is often observed with phrase-final weakening. While both varieties show similar vowel glottalization usage, Australian English tends to use voice quality more extensively to mark focus than American English, with a greater overall tendency toward glottalization. This suggests that the impressionistic difference perceived in the general use of voice quality between the varieties (more robust glottalized vowels in Australian English) stems from differences in the use of glottalization in marking prosodic structure. These findings underscore the role of non-contrastive voice quality in shaping prosodic structure across varieties while also revealing dialect-specific interactions between phonetics and prosody in its manifestation.

This study examines variation in coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Seoul Korean as a function of prosodic boundaries and gender, exploring its role in an emerging denasalization sound change. Coarticulatory vowel nasality, measured by A1–P0, was analyzed in the word-initial vowels of /ma.mi/ across three prosodic boundary conditions (IP-initial, AP-initial, and Wd-initial) in 35 speakers in their 20s. Results show that phrase-initial vowels exhibit reduced nasality as part of domain-initial articulatory strengthening, suggesting that denasalization of word-initial nasal consonants extends to the following vowel, reducing its coarticulatory nasalization and thus signaling the progression of a position-driven sound change. Significant gender differences were found: male speakers consistently adhere to this change throughout the vowel, exhibiting greater reductions in coarticulatory vowel nasalization in phrase-initial contexts. In contrast, female speakers retain higher nasality levels in both phrase-initial and phrase-medial positions by regulating the coarticulatory process. These gender-related differences may reflect socially grounded perceptions of nasality and/or female speakers’ tendency to preserve phonological features, influencing speech production choices. These findings highlight the interplay between prosodically driven phonetic variation and gender: speakers actively control the degree of vowel nasalization, and this phonetic variation, in turn, is further shaped by gender, potentially evolving into a systematic sound change.

This article presents articulatory–kinematic data on preboundary lengthening (Intonational Phrase-final lengthening) from the productions of ten native speakers of American English—a relatively rare class of phonetic data compared with the more widely available acoustic data. The dataset includes three trisyllabic nonce words (bábaba, babába, bababá), each designed to manipulate the location of lexical stress. These were produced under prosodic conditions that varied in boundary position and focus-induced phrasal prominence, enabling analysis of how preboundary lengthening is distributed across words with different lexical stress locations and how it interacts with prosodic prominence. Articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography (EMA, Carstens AG200), providing kinematic measurements such as movement duration, peak velocity, and displacement of articulatory gestures. The accompanying files allow examination of individual speaker variation in these measures as modulated by prosodic structure, including boundary and prominence effects. While theoretical findings have been reported in a previous study, the full dataset, including detailed descriptions of individual speaker patterns, is made available here. By making these less commonly available articulatory data publicly available, we aim to promote broad reuse and support further research in prosody, articulatory phonetics, and speech production.