Kevin Roon, Post-doctoral Associate,
Speech Production, Acoustics, and Perception Lab, CUNY Graduate Center,
Friday, December 9, 3:30-4:30, in ILC N400.

Title: Modeling feature-driven modulations of phonetic output and verbal
response times

Abstract:
In this talk I will present a series of experiments that show that
verbal response times and phonetic output in various tasks can be
modulated by phonological features, but that not all features affect RTs
the same way. The focus of the talk will be on discussing possible
reasons for these differences. In Roon and Gafos (2015), we have shown
that RTs for stop-initial CV nonce syllables in a response-distractor
task are sensitive independently to voicing and primary oral
articulator. The experiments from Roon and Gafos (2015) showed another
surprising effect based on features: RTs were much slower in an
experiment where participants knew the articulator of their response but
could not predict the voicing than in an experiment where they knew the
voicing but could not predict the articulator. Yuen et al. (2010) showed
that participants reliably had more alveolar constriction when saying
/kab/ or /sab/ when they heard a /tab/ distractor than when they heard a
distractor that was the same as their utterance. In Roon and Gafos
(2016) we have proposed a dynamical computational model of phonological
planning that accounts for both the feature-level RT modulations and the
cross-experiment RT differences from Roon and Gafos (2015) as well as
for the differences in alveolar constriction found by Yuen et al.
(2010). In related work, Mouskou, Roon, & Rastle (2014) showed that in a
masked-prime experiment, participants RTs for reading CVC nonce
syllables aloud were faster when the prime and target differed only in
voicing (e.g., piz-BAF) than when they differed in many features (e.g.,
suz-BAF). However, in experiments we are running now, we do not find a
similar effect when the prime and target differ only in place (e.g.,
diz-BAF). I will discuss how various formal representations of these
features might account for the differences in RT modulation.