Abstract Template for LabPhon2012

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 1997, 2004) described vowel dispersion in a subset of the Easy/Hard database (Torretta, 1995). The core finding was that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker’s F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represent difficult recognition targets, due to competition from other words in the lexicon (‘hard’ words) than in easy recognition targets (‘easy’ words). The goal of the current study was to test whether the pattern observed in the subset extended to a larger portion of the Easy/Hard database, and whether the effect persisted when controlling for known other determinants of vowel dispersion. Extending the investigation to all monophthongs in the database, we find that recognition difficulty fails to have a significant effect on dispersion when effects of segmental context are brought under statistical control. We conclude that the pattern of dispersion in Wright (1997) is not due to lexical competition, but is most likely due to segmental context, particularly place of articulation of consonants preceding and following the target vowels. We discuss the implications of this reanalysis for studies of pronunciation variation.