Perceptual Learning of Systemic Cross-Category Vowel Variation

Abstract

Phonological processes such as vowel chain shifting result in complex systems of crosscategory vowel variation across spoken varieties of a language (Labov, 1994).The experiments comprising this dissertation aimed to understand how listeners cope with such systemic pronunciation variation to recognize spoken words.Recent research has shown that the ability of listeners to cope with pronunciation variation is due, in large part, to perceptual learning mechanisms that adjust speech perception and recognition processes based on distributional properties of the speech input (see Samuel & Kraljic, 2009).Per-