R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Niedzielski, Nancy"

Browsing by Author "Niedzielski, Nancy"

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An acoustic analysis and cross-linguistics study of the phonemic inventory of Nez Perce
(2013-09-16) Nelson, Katherine; Niedzielski, Nancy; Willis, Christina M.; Oswald, Frederick L.
This dissertation is an acoustic description of the phonemic inventory of Nez Perce [nez], a Penutian language of the United States. Acoustic work has been conducted on the consonants of Nez Perce, but no acoustic work has been conducted on the vowels or vowel harmony system. This work begins with an overview of the dissertation, language situation, and previous research. Following the introduction are chapters on ejectives and plain obstruents, plain and glottalized sonorants, vowels, vowel harmony, and the conclusion. Nez Perce has both plain and ejective stop series, a plain and ejective affricate series, and a plain fricative series. I examine these segments for acoustic correlates comparing them to previous research, other languages and current theory. The ejectives are described with f0, intensity, jitter, burst amplitude and VOT. I discuss fricatives in terms of spectra, duration, formant transitions, and moments. The timing and realization of glottalization on glottalized and plain sonorants is investigated. Segments are measured for duration and are visually and aurally inspected for variation of glottalization, realized using pitch, laryngealization, glottal stops, or a combination of these features. It is nearly always realized on the sonorant rather than before or after. Vowels are plotted and compared to previous phonological descriptions. The inventory is /i, æ, a, o, u/ rather than the canonical five-vowel system, leading to the description of the inventory as having a “gap” and not maximally contrastive. I suggest that if Nez Perce vowels are considered using a shifted axis then the vowels are maximally contrastive. The non-canonical vowel inventory leads to two seeming unrelated vowel harmony sets: dominant, /i, a, o/, and recessive, /i, æ, u/. The proposed shifted axis view becomes important for reanalyzing the vowel harmony to reconcile these unusual sets. Previous analyses have described Nez Perce vowel harmony as based on advanced tongue root (ATR). I investigated Nez Perce vowels for ATR acoustic correlates; however, the results provide evidence both supporting and not supporting an ATR analysis. I propose an alternate analysis for the vowel harmony based on the principle of maximal contrast, evidenced by the shifted axis model.
An articulatory phonological analysis of vowel phonology in spoken MSA
(2002) Thesieres, Holly; Niedzielski, Nancy
This thesis is an examination of the regional dialectal influence of colloquial varieties of Arabic on the allophony of vowels in Modern Standard Arabic. It is an expansion of research done by Al-Ani (1970), who claims that speakers' native, colloquial dialect of Arabic has an influence upon the realization of phonological patterns in standardized MSA, and that these influences can be seen to differ in small but noticeable and structured ways. This thesis lends support to Al-Ani's research on Iraqi Arabic by examining the dialects spoken in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. Analysis of the data obtained was conducted under the methodology of Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein, 1992), a theory of phonology which examines phonological patterns in terms of articulatory gestures. This thesis shows that Articulatory Phonology is a successful method of analysis, that not only describes phonological patterning, but explains it in light of articulatory gestures.
Diphthongization in Brazilian Portuguese
(2010) Colley, Michael; Niedzielski, Nancy
The goal of this dissertation is to increase our understanding of language variation and change by examining a particular case of linguistic variation in Rio de Janeiro. Diphthongization of back vowels before word final /s/ in words like mas "but" is a commonly noted feature of the Portuguese spoken in Rio de Janeiro. This leads to a potential merger of /a/ and /ai/ in this environment, such that mas is homophonous with mais "more." Diphthongization is examined as a conditioned sound change, and it is shown that phonetic environments that favor large formant transitions also tend to favor diphthongization, both historically and in synchronic variation. Although both /a/ and /ai/ are fully diphthongal before word final /s/ for nearly all speakers in Rio, some differentiate them by fronting and/or raising the onset of /a/. This fronting and raising appears to be a change in progress for the word mais, with younger speakers in the working and middle classes having the most advanced tokens on average. In addition, young female speakers appear to be leading the fronting and raising of the mas onset. The vowel /a/ was also examined before non word final /s/ and /z/ (eg. passa "pass") for comparison. Although /a/ in this environment is more monophthongal than /a/ and /ai/ in the pre-word final /s/ environment, it does show signs of diphthongization, again with young, working class females leading the change. These correlations are similar to those found for sound changes in many other societies, though this is the first time they have been noted in Brazil. Perceptual data on minimal pairs like mas and mais show a lack of symmetry between production and perception, with some speakers producing a distinction that they do not claim to perceive. At first glance, this suggests a case of a near merger. However, upon closer examination, it appears that lexical diffusion is a better explanation for the patterns found in the data. Specifically, words with a higher frequency of usage tend to show more fronting and raising of the vowel than low frequency words.
Evaluating the use of adaptive transform acoustic coding (ATRAC) data compression in acoustic phonetics
(2001) Nash, Carlos Marcelo; Niedzielski, Nancy
In linguistic research, current practices of recording audio data involves a mixture of analogue and digital technologies giving little forethought to methodological issues and insight into the consequences of using one technology over the other. Analogue recorders are inherently flawed and are not ideal for acoustic analysis. With the introduction of digital recorders into the consumer market, it is difficult to decide which recorder is best suited for linguistic and acoustic analysis. The MiniDisc, introduced by Sony in 1992, is a magneto-optical recorder that offers 'CD-like' quality, in a compact and shock-resistant system, thus making it a potential tool for linguistic field research. However it is not known how the psycho-acoustically based compression system, ATRAC, affects the spectrum of speech sounds. This thesis compares the MiniDisc with a DAT recorder and analyses the differences using spectral and spectrographic analyses. In addition, this thesis tries to establish sound practices for using the MiniDisc in linguistic research.
Imitation, Awareness; and Folk Linguistic Artifacts
(2011) Brunner, Elizabeth Gentry; Niedzielski, Nancy
Imitations are sophisticated performances displaying regular patterns. The study of imitation allows linguiSts to understand speakers' perceptions of sociolinguistic variation. In this dissertation, I analyze imitations of non-native accents in order to answer two questions: what can imitation reveal about perception, and how are folk linguistic artifacts (Preston 1996) involved in imitation? These questions are approached from the framework offolk linguistic awareness (Preston 1996). By redefining the concept of salience according to the modes of folk linguistic awareness, I am able to more precisely consider how imitation reflects salience. I address both of these questions by eliciting imitations from speakers in which folk artifacts are present. For my investigation, twenty speakers read a short passage in English. Ten were non-native speakers of American English (NNAE) and ten were native speakers of American English (AE). The AE speakers were recorded reading the passage in their regular voice and with two types of imitated accents: free imitations, which were spontaneously produced, and modeled imitations, which were produced directly after hearing the NNAE speakers. Free imitations revealed folk linguistic artifacts, while modeled imitations were more reflective of the immediate target. Participants listened to the authentic and imitated accents and were asked to determine the accent and authenticity of each speaker. I found that there was not a significant difference in the pitch and vowels between free and modeled AE imitations, which indicated that these aspects of imitations are largely based on folk linguistic artifacts. Listeners were able to determine which voices were authentic and which were imitated. Listeners were also able to identify the speakers' accents, perhaps aided by the folk artifact status of these particular accents. Listeners were better at identifying the accents of free imitations than modeled imitations, which suggested that listeners prefer imitations that are solely based on folk artifacts. Overall, I found that imitation is a valuable tool for the analysis of speech perception. The modes of folk linguistic awareness are useful in interpreting imitations and understanding salience. This research shows that folk linguistic artifacts are the foundation of imitations and an important tool in perceptual categorization.
Local Sociophonetic Knowledge in Speech Perception
(2011) Koops, Christian; Niedzielski, Nancy
Sociophonetic studies of speech perception have demonstrated that the social identity which listeners attribute to a speaker can lead to predictable biases in the way speech sounds produced by that speaker are linguistically categorized (e.g., Strand & Johnson 1996; Niedzielski 1999; Hay, Warren & Drager 2006). This has been observed where listeners use available social information about a speaker to resolve lexical ambiguity. However, less is known about the role of sociophonetic knowledge in speech perception when listeners are not faced with global linguistic ambiguity. Drawing on Strand's (2000) study of the processing effects of gender typicality, this dissertation investigates whether sociophonetic knowledge can facilitate or inhibit unambiguous spoken word recognition. Based on a survey of sociophonetic variation in the Houston metropolitan area, predictions are formulated for the processing of words containing four vowels: /ei/ and /[varepsilon]/ in the speech of older and younger Anglos, and /α/ and /Λ/ in the speech of young Anglos and young African-Americans. Houston listeners identified words containing variants of these vowels in a congruent condition and in an incongruent condition. In the congruent condition the combination of speaker identity and vowel variant was designed to match the listener's knowledge of local language variation. In the incongruent condition, it was designed to contradict it. A congruency effect was found for some but not all vowels. The results indicate that social information about a speaker can also affect speech perception in the absence of lexical ambiguity, but only where words are at least temporarily ambiguous. Where there is no linguistic ambiguity at all, perception can be unaffected by sociophonetic knowledge. These results are discussed in the context of Luce, McLennan & Charles-Luce's (2003) time course hypothesis and in the context of exemplar-based models of sociophonetic knowledge (Johnson 1997, Pierrehumbert 2001).
Measuring implicit and explicit attitudes toward foreign-accented speech
(2011) Pantos, Andrew J.; Niedzielski, Nancy
The purpose of this research was to investigate the nature of listeners' attitudes toward foreign-accented speech and the manner in which those attitudes are formed. This study measured 165 participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward US- and foreign-accented audio stimuli. Implicit attitudes were measured with an audio Implicit Association Test. The use of audio stimuli as repeated tokens for their phonological attributes represents an innovation in IAT methodology. Explicit attitudes were elicited through self-report. The explicit task was contextualized as a fictional medical malpractice trial; participants heard the recorded audio testimony of two actors (one US-accented and one Korean-accented) portraying opposing expert witnesses. Four test conditions counterbalanced across participants were created from the recordings. Participants rated the experts on fourteen dependent variables ('traits'): believability, credibility, judgment, knowledge, competence, trustworthiness, likeability, friendliness, expertise, intelligence, warmth, persuasiveness, presentation style, and clarity of presentation. Participants were also asked for their attitudes toward the speakers relative to each other (i.e., Which doctor would you side with in this dispute?). The question of speaker preference was posed as a binary choice, an 11- point slider scale measure, and two confirmation questions asking participants to state how fair they thought an outcome for each party would be. This study's hypothesis that participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same speech would diverge was confirmed. The IAT results indicated an implicit bias [ D =.33, p∠.05] in favor of the US-accented speaker, while the self-report results indicated an explicit bias [ F (2,121)=3.969, p=.021, η 2 =.062] in favor of the foreign-accented speaker in the slider scale and confirmation questions [ F (2,121)=3.708, p=.027, η 2 =.058, and F (2,121)=3.563, p=.031, η 2 =.056]. While the binary choice question showed a trend toward favoring the foreign-accented speaker, the result was not significant. No discernable pattern was found to exist in attitudes toward the speaker by trait. This study's findings argue for the recognition of both implicit and explicit attitude constructs and the integration of implicit attitudes measurement methodologies into future language attitudes research. Additional theoretical implications of these findings for future language attitudes research are also discussed, including implications for selecting an appropriate cognitive processing model.
Palatalization in Mandarin Loanwords: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach
(2014-12-01) Ma, Ling; Niedzielski, Nancy; Englebretson, Robert; Achard, Michel
This study conducts an Optimality-Theoretic analysis on palatalization phenomenon in Mandarin loanwords borrowed from American English based on transliterated American state and city names. Because of the differences between Mandarin and American English in sound inventories and syllable structures, words introduced to Mandarin from American English may need to undergo some feature change. The present study focuses on the palatalization phenomenon of velar consonants, and the constraint-based theoretical framework provides an explanation. The constraints and their ranking accounting in this study are: 1) *COMPLEX, *VELAR-V(+front), MAX, IDENT(dorsal) >> IDENT(place), 2) *[PALATALIZATION-V(+low, +front)-n]SYLL, DEP >> *VELAR-V(+front) >> IDENT(place). However, some other factors besides phonological ones, such as character choosing, and translation conventions, may lead to some counterexamples, and thus may need to be further studied.
Power to Represent: The Spatialized Politics of Style in Houston Hip Hop
(2011) Taylor, Christopher Michael; Niedzielski, Nancy
Combining quantitative sociophonetic methods and a qualitative, ethnographic acpproach to the study of language and social relations, my current research program focuses on the role of language in competing hip hop cultures. This research draws on early scholarship in cultural studies (Hebdige 1979), as well as what some have termed post- subcultural studies (Muggleton & Weinzierl 2003). Central to my own work are two theoretical concerns shared by these currents of scholarship, including: (1) How sociohistorical forces (including institutionally-mediated social action) shape cultural frameworks for symbolically staking out a position in the social landscape (2) How prominent social positioning in local cultral hierarchies shapes popular ideas regarding such intersecting notions as authentcity and indigeneity Regarding the first of these concerns, I examine how popular hip hop artists reflexively bring into focus a repertoire of spatialized social practices by rapping about them in their music -- a discursive practice I term metastylistic discourse. By selectively rapping about social practices indexical of their experiences of place, not only communicate a particular take on the local (i.e. their own); they directly position social and indirectly position soicolinguistic practices centrally among stylistic practices distinguishing Houston aeshetically from the cultural forms associated with other scenes. Central here is the second concern I share with current approaches to cultural studies, particularly, the significance of where social actors (i.e. established artists) find themselves in local social hierarchies. Established artists shape and reshape ways of talking about local life partly through econtextualizing prior texts. It is through the circulation of such texts that a discursive framework emerges, the product of a trans-modal series of recontexutalizations which serve to communicate an experience of Houston, what it looks and sounds like. In short, my current project works to close the gap between sociolinguistic approaches to the formation and interrogation of stylistic norms and research in cultural studies along these same lines (Hodkinson 2003, Piano 2003). By examining these processes in the context of hip hop, my work illustrates how social actors shape cultural norms through performance
The Effect of Chinese Characters on the Speech Perception and Production of Retroflex Sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin
(2017-04-21) Tso, Ru-Ping Ruby; Niedzielski, Nancy
Evidence has shown that subtle implicit information of a speaker’s characteristics or social identity inferred by the listener can influence how language varieties are perceived, and can cause significant effects on the result of speech perception (e.g., Williams 1976; Beebe 1981; Thakerar and Giles 1981; Niedzielski 1999; Hay et al. 2006a; Hay and Drager 2010; Koops 2011). This dissertation aimed at studying the effects of Chinese orthography on the speech production and perception of retroflex sibilants in Mandarin Chinese. The two variants of written Chinese characters, traditional and simplified, served as subtle implicit information to index speaker’s identity of a Taiwan Mandarin speaker or Beijing Mandarin speaker respectively. The experiment designs were based on the hypotheses that Taiwan Mandarin speakers are aware of the differences between the Taiwan Mandarin dialect and the Beijing Mandarin dialect at both segmental and suprasegmental level. Furthermore, Taiwan Mandarin speakers can activate dialectal features of Beijing Mandarin with the presence of simplified Chinese characters. In the word-identification tasks of the perception study, a statistically significant relationship between the identification of retroflex phonemes and the variety of written Chinese characters was found for all participants with a Person’s chi-square test of association. With a 95% confidence interval, the odds ratio estimated that with the presence of simplified Chinese characters, participants were at least 1.83 times more likely to identify a retroflex audio stimulus with the actual retroflex phoneme instead of its corresponding alveolar sound than with the presence of traditional Chinese characters. The effect of character variation on speech production was not as straightforward as that in perception. From the data collected in this study, minimal effect was found; however, when taking the speaker’s attitude towards different varieties of characters into consideration, personal preferences toward the varieties of characters may lead to a stylistic and intentional variation in speech production of retroflex sibilants. It was found through the interview with participants of this study that Taiwan Mandarin speakers were fully aware of the variation in the production of retroflex sibilants. They were also aware of the association between simplified characters and the Beijing Mandarin dialect and this association was activated during the speech perception and production experiments of this dissertation. This study adds to the finding of research in sociophonetic variations that an asymmetry in speech production and speech perception may be a deliberate choice of the speaker instead of a result of unconscious perception and production of speech. In addition, this dissertation also shows that the abundant cultural and ideological values associated with the usage of Chinese written characters and spoken dialects are potential topics of future research.
The Effect of Linguistic Experience on the Perception of Pitch Contour
(2014-01-31) Galindo, John; Englebretson, Robert; Niedzielski, Nancy; Achard, Michel
Studies conducted in the area of tone perception suggest that experience with tonal features such as pitch height, direction, duration, and contour in the L1 of the listener affect the perception of such features. This study consists of a categorical perception experiment to investigate whether native experience with a tone language affects the perception of pitch contours. Subjects are divided into two groups: native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers. The central hypothesis of this study is that Mandarin speakers would perceive a continuum between the rising tone and the falling-rising tone categorically, while English speakers would make no such distinction. Results from a discrimination task indicate that neither the Mandarin group nor the English group perceived the tonal continuum categorically. This may be accounted for by the fact that differences between Tone 2 (rising) and Tone 3 (falling-rising) in Mandarin are perceptually ambiguous for both native and non-native listeners.
The sociolinguistic impact of (sub-)urbanization: Mapping /ai/ variation across Houston
(2018-11-27) Jeon, Lisa R; Niedzielski, Nancy
Major demographic transformations in the United States have shifted the country’s population into large urban areas, and have reshaped its dialect boundaries. Despite this, urbanization is a relatively new area of study in regional dialectology. Prior studies have established that linguistic and social factors associated with urban development have a clear impact on language variation and change. Urbanization can lead to the leveling of dialect differences between urban and rural speakers, as well as the emergence of innovative features and norms in the dialects of younger speakers. Studies of the linguistic impact of urbanization have focused almost exclusively on the speech of rural or urban communities, however, with the most attention paid to the latter. Very little research has explored the speech of suburban communities in the context of the rural and urban communities that surround them. This study addresses this gap by examining phonetic variation among Anglo natives of Houston’s three most populous counties. The population of these counties has undergone rapid demographic transformations over the past few decades. Today, the approximate combined population of these three counties surpasses 5 million people and the majority of these Houstonians live in suburban neighborhoods. Prominent neighborhood differences exist across this region, however, in terms of the degree of urbanness, demographics, and community attitudes of its inhabitants. The analysis draws on these socio-geographic insights to explore the social meaning of linguistic variation and the motivations behind participation in local sound change. The linguistic variable analyzed is a well-known feature of sound change in the southern U.S. English: the monophthongal or diphthongal production of the vowel /ai/. This vowel is a particularly suitable variable to focus on for examining urbanization in the South because its variable production has been linked with urbanness in previous research. Data come from the speech of 65 Anglos (27 females and 38 males, aged 18- 90) who participated in the 2017 Kinder Houston Area Survey, a telephone survey conducted annually to assess the public opinions of Houston residents. Acoustic phonetic and statistical analyses of /ai/ variation among these speakers shows that Anglos are moving toward the diphthongal realization in apparent time, in parallel with other regions of the South. However, some Anglo speakers still produce monophthongal /ai/, regardless of their age, educational attainment, county of residence, or urbanness. This suggests that variant /ai/ pronunciations may carry important indexical meanings in the local community. Speakers orienting to Houston’s traditional linguistic market may use traditional linguistic forms as a way to resist innovation and maintain their local identity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, speakers orienting to Houston’s emerging linguistic market may stigmatize associations with the traditional monophthongal /ai/ variant because of its connections with the stereotypical Texas accent. I show that Spatial GIS analyses of speakers linguistic behavior, together with their locations in the city, enables much more nuanced and representative account of the dialectology of Houston at the beginning of the 21st century. Composite GIS maps showing the variability of /ai/production among Houstonians indicate the most significant differences among speakers from neighborhoods with different urbanness levels. I argue that these patterns are particularly likely in a city such as Houston, due to its sociogeographic context and history of urban development across the community. The sociolinguistic literature contains relatively little work on phonetic variation in the English of suburban speakers, yet urbanization will become increasingly integral to speaker identities and ideologies of place as rapid urban development continues in the 21st century. This study presents a step toward understanding the impact of (sub-) urbanization on local identities and linguistic behavior.
The Strong Island Sound: Sociolinguistic Evidence for Emerging American Ethnicities
(2013-08-05) Olivo, Ann; Niedzielski, Nancy; Englebretson, Robert; Bratter, Jenifer L.
This dissertation presents evidence for the usage of New York City English (NYCE) out on Long Island, NY. Many residents on this 118-mile long island are descendents of the European immigrants who moved to NYC around the turn of the twentieth century—mainly Italians, Irish, and Polish. When these groups moved out to the suburbs of Long Island half a century later, they brought their NYCE with them. Today, this ancestral connection, as well as age and gender, serves as a motivation for Long Islanders’ continued usage of NYCE. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews conducted over two years with local residents of Suffolk and Nassau counties on Long Island. Participants were interviewed about their personal histories and asked to read a word list. A discourse analysis of the personal history interviews informed the categories used for multiple regression analyses to ensure the coded categories matched onto speakers’ self-identification practices. The discourse analysis also provides evidence for the attitudes Long Islanders hold about themselves as “real New Yorkers”, about their own language usage, and about the language spoken by “people from the city”. Multiple regression analyses fit with mixed effects models were run to demonstrate the state of NYCE as it is spoken on Long Island. Results are presented for the long ingliding vowels (raised-/oh/ and the split short-a system), the long upgliding vowels, and r-vocalization. Although some younger speakers are using fewer traditional NYCE features, those who identify with their families’ ancestral immigrant pasts tend to prefer the traditional NYCE features, retaining a “Strong Island” sound to their speech.
Tonogenesis in Central dialects of Malagasy: Acoustic and perceptual evidence with implications for synchronic mechanisms of sound change
(2017-01-23) Howe, Penelope Jane; Niedzielski, Nancy
This dissertation examines evidence that a group of "Central" dialects of the Austronesian language Malagasy, spoken on the island of Madagascar, is currently developing phonological tone contrasts in place of a former consonant voicing contrast. Analysis of acoustic phonetic data from speakers of a wide range of Malagasy dialects reveals that in contrast to Non-central dialect speakers, Central speakers have nearly neutralized modal voicing contrasts in all oral obstruent series, particularly in stressed syllables, and have developed consistent pitch contrasts, in both stressed and unstressed syllables, of a magnitude and persistence comparable to those of other tone languages. Responses to identification and discrimination tasks indicate that perception of pitch is quasi-categorical for the Central group in syllables with oral obstruents, with pitch typically overriding the modal voicing cue. For the Non-central group, pitch is a secondary, non-categorical cue which is subordinate to modal voicing. Age-stratification is observed in the Central group in both production and perception, indicating that this is a recent development. Prenasalized obstruents are distinguished primarily by voicing and/or duration of nasalization for both dialect groups; however, evidence suggests incipient tonal contrasts in the Central dialects among these sounds. Comparison of individual production and perception patterns supports the claim that perception leads production at change onset and lags production as change moves to completion. In contrast to what is seen in some other languages (e.g., Hyslop 2009), data from different consonant classes suggest that the shift to tone occurred almost simultaneously across all oral obstruent types. The data show that sound change is phonetically gradual as opposed to phonologically abrupt, and evidence of cue covariation in production and perception support Beddor (2009)'s model of a coarticulatory path to sound change. Weak support is found for Thurgood (2007)'s claim that the direct connection between voicing contrasts and tone is via the influence of laryngeal settings on phonation type. The combination of sociohistorical facts and contemporary language attitudes also suggests hypotheses concerning social factors which may be driving this change. In general, evidence of tonogenesis in progress in these dialects reveals a unique scenario of ongoing change which is ripe for further study.
Understanding the Conditions for Detecting a Phonology to Articulation Cascade in Speech Production
(2023-08-11) Irons, Sarah T; Fischer-Baum, Simon; Martin, Randi; Niedzielski, Nancy
Phonetic distortions, subtle acoustic traces of how a competitor would be produced on the articulation of a response, have been used as evidence for cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory implementation, that is that information flows between these levels of representation in the language production system prior to selection at the phonological planning level. Phonetic distortions are a robust finding, when focusing on speech errors, produced either in tongue twisters (Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009; Frisch & Wright, 2002; Goldrick, 2016; Goldrick & Blumstein, 2006; Goldrick et al., 2016; Goldstein et al., 2007; McMillan & Corley, 2010; Pouplier, 2007) or in naturalistic speech (Alderete et al., 2021). However, a recent study failed to find evidence for phonetic distortions in another context in which it would be expected, single word reading aloud of irregular words in which the lexical and sublexical routes generate phonological plans for different vowels (Irons, 2020). The goal of this dissertation is to understand why this discrepancy exists, that is why phonetic distortions are observed in some, but not all cases, in which they are predicted by cascading activation theories of speech production as there are many, potentially critical differences between the paradigms that do and do not observe phonetic distortions. In this dissertation, I present two experiments, one using tongue twisters, and one using picture-word interference, designed specifically to control for differences in errors, scope of planning and word position, to allow us to better understand when a cascade from phonological planning to articulatory implementation can be observed phonetically. Similar to past tongue twister work (Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009; Frisch & Wright, 2002; Goldrick, 2016; Goldrick & Blumstein, 2006; Goldrick et al., 2016; Goldstein et al., 2007; McMillan & Corley, 2010; Pouplier, 2007) I observed phonetic distortions, evidence for cascading activation in onset tongue twisters. In nucleus tongue twisters I found that cascading activation might present differently in vowels than it does in consonants. We did not, however, observe phonetic distortions in picture-word interference, therefore open questions remain about how scope of planning and error effects may be responsible for phonetic distortion evidence for cascading activation.

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