Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study explores whether the top-down influence ofspeaker age guise influences patterns of compensation forcoarticulation. /u/-fronting variation in California is linked toboth phonetic and social factors: /u/ in alveolar contexts isfronter than in bilabial contexts and /u/-fronting is moreadvanced in younger speakers. We investigate whether theapparent age of the speaker, via a guise depicting a 21-year-old woman or a 55-year-old woman, influences whetherlisteners compensate for coarticulation on /u/. Listenersperformed a paired discrimination task of /u/ with a raised F2(fronted) in an alveolar consonant context (/sut/), compared tonon-fronted /u/ in a non-coronal context. Overall,discrimination was more veridical for the younger guise, thanfor the older guise, leading to the perception of more inherentlyfronted variants for the younger talker. Results indicate thatapparent talker age may influence perception of /u/-fronting,but not only in coarticulatory contexts.