Influence of consonantal context on the pronunciation of vowels: A comparison of human readers and computational models

Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler, Suzanne Bick

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

In two experiments, we found that college students' pronunciations of vowels in nonwords are influenced both by preceding and following consonants. The predominance of rimes in previous studies of reading does not appear to arise because readers are unable to pick up associations that cross the onset-rime boundary, but rather because English has relatively few such associations. Comparisons between people's vowel pronunciations and those produced by various computational models of reading showed that no model provided a good account of human performance on nonwords for which the vowel shows contextual conditioning. Possible directions for improved models are suggested.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)49-78
Number of pages30
JournalCognition
Volume88
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1 2003

Keywords

  • Computational models
  • Nonwords
  • Onset
  • Reading
  • Rime
  • Vowel

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Influence of consonantal context on the pronunciation of vowels: A comparison of human readers and computational models'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this