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The hyperspace effect: Phonetic targets are hyperarticulated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Keith Johnson ,
Edward Flemming  and
Richard Wright
Keith Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Edward Flemming
Affiliation:
UCLA
Richard Wright
Affiliation:
UCLA
*
Keith Johnson, Department of Biocommunication, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294-0019
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Abstract

A commonly made, but rarely defended, assumption is that phonetic reduction processes apply to hyperarticulated phonetic targets. Results from experiments reported in this paper support this assumption. In various experimental conditions, listeners adjusted the input parameters of a speech synthesizer until the vowels it produced sounded like the vowels found in a set of example words. A preliminary study indicated that the method of adjustment is a feasible tool for studying vowel systems. Interestingly, listeners in the study chose vowels that were systematically different from those measured in productions of the set of example words: high vowels were higher, low vowels were lower, front vowels were farther front, and back vowels were farther back. We hypothesized that this extreme vowel space corresponds to phonetic targets that are hyperarticulated: HYPERSPACE. This hypothesis was tested in the two main experiments. The first experiment controlled for possible effects of instructions and phonetic training on the listeners' choices. In the second experiment, we improved the naturalness and distinctiveness of the synthetic vowels. The results indicate that the extreme vowels chosen by the listeners were consistent with those produced in hyperarticulated speech; moreover, the hyperspace effect is robust across experimental conditions. These results validate the hypothesis that phonetic targets are hyperarticulated, and are consistent with a two-stage model of phonetic implementation: at the first stage distinctive features are mapped to hyperarticulated phonetic targets, and at the second stage these phonetic targets are reduced.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 69 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 505 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported by an NIH training grant (T32 DC00029) to Peter Ladefoged and Patricia Keating, and an NIH FIRST award (R29 DC01645-01) to Keith Johnson. We would like to thank Bob Port for his encouraging words in the early stages of this work, Peter Ladefoged for his enthusiastic interest, Doug Whalen for suggesting Experiment 2, and Mary Beckman and Jim Flege for comments on an earlier version of the paper. Our colleagues at the Indiana University Speech Research Laboratory, the Indiana University Department of Linguistics, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory, and the Acoustical Society of America gave us many helpful comments. Two anonymous reviewers helped us see things we hadn't seen before.

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