UC Santa Cruz

The goal of this thesis is to better understand the impact of different phonological feature classes (voice, place of articulation, manner of articulation) on the likelihood of a listener recognizing a mispronounced word in natural speech. I examine this question by introducing mispronunciations into binomial expressions, semi-idiomatic phrases like salt and pepper, where the first half of the phrase lexically and semantically primes the second half. Mispronunciations were produced by deliberately changing the voice, place, or manner features of the onset consonant of the third word in a binomial. A set of experiments investigates (i) how listeners rate the effect of different feature errors on overall pronunciation quality, and (ii) how accurate they are at correctly recalling those erroneous pronunciations. Results are first analyzed for an effect of mispronunciation and find that listeners give higher ratings and are more accurate at correctly recalling binomial expressions with no mispronunciation, regardless of the particular feature change. A subsequent set of post-hoc analyses of the results are run, comparing the different mispronunciation conditions against each other and breaking down and comparing the distinctive features that comprise the manner feature class (continuancy, stridency, nasality, lateralization). Results of the ratings and recall task find that different feature changes differently impact listener perception of sound errors: listeners are less likely to make mistakes when recalling words with manner errors in the target position than words with voice or place errors, and they assign lower ratings to binomial expressions with manner feature errors than equivalent binomials with mispronunciations involving voicing features.