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Increased exposure and phonetic context can help listeners recognize allophonic variants
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Description: This project contains the auditory stimuli used in the study "Increased exposure and phonetic context can help listeners recognize allophonic variants" (Authors: Malte C. Viebahn and Paul A. Luce). The stimuli consist of the original soundfiles and versions that have been time-adjusted (using Praat's PSOLA algorithm). The Praat scripts can be used to compare both versions. It follows a brief description of the study: This study examines the role of exposure and phonetic context in the recognition of words that are produced with nasal flaps in American English (e.g. the word center produced as cenner). Previous work has shown that despite their high frequency of occurrence, words produced with nasal flaps are recognized more slowly and less accurately compared to canonical pronunciation variants produced with /nt/, which occur less frequently. We conducted two experiments in order to investigate how exposure and phonetic context influence this reported processing disadvantage for flapped variants. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the time to recognize flapped variants presented in isolation decreased over the course of the experiment while accuracy increased. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed further that flapped variants that were presented in a casually produced sentence context were recognized faster compared to flapped variants presented in a carefully produced sentence context. Interestingly, the effect of context emerged only in late responses and was present only for flapped but not canonical variants. Our results thus show that increased exposure and phonetic context can help listeners recognize allophonic variants. This finding provides further support for the notion that listeners are flexible and adapt to phonetic variation in speech.