Jan Charles-Luce
Elvira Ragonese
Betina Lewin
Dept. of Commun. Disord. and Sci., Univ. at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260
Native English speakers originally produced bisyllabic words containing intervocalic alveolar stops, e.g., writer and rider. These words were embedded in both semantically neutral and semantically biasing passages. In addition, both neutral and biasing passages were produced in two conditions. In one condition, a listener was present in the recording room with the speaker. In the other condition, the speaker was alone in the recording room. The production results showed that flapping did not occur in the listener-present condition but that it did in the listener-absent condition. The present investigation examined whether these production results are functional for the listener. All production tokens were excised from the original passages and presented to subjects auditorily for identification. Subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli, e.g., writer and rider. On each trial subjects heard one member of the pair. They were to circle the word that they thought they heard in a response booklet. Percent correct identification results show that subjects were best at correctly identifying the tokens when they had been produced originally in the listener-present, neutral passage and worst at identification in the listener-absent, bias passage. [Work supported by NIH.]