Taiwanese Mandarin and American English clear speech production and perception

<div class="page" title="Page 2"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> I report on a cross-linguistic study investigating how differences in phonological structures influence clear speech productions in Taiwanese Mandarin and American English, exploring whether speakers of these languages modify their speech in similar or different ways, and on the indirect correlation of those acoustic realizations with the clear speech benefit, intelligibility enhancement, in Mandarin. This systematic comparison may further our understanding of clear speech as produced in languages with substantial phonological differences and as produced and perceived in a language characterized by lexical tone. The results of this study revealed Mandarin clear speech elicited by a clear speech prompt with a non-native listener target population generally affords the clear speech benefit and that speakers exhibiting greater increases in tone duration and vowel space dispersion tend to be more &ldquo;successful.&rdquo; Additionally, cross-linguistic similarities in clear speech production strategies were evidenced. In both Mandarin and English, speakers tended to expand their vowel spaces (although Mandarin speakers generally exhibited less expansion); increase rime duration; and increase absolute segmental F0 mean. Globally, increases in pitch range were cross-linguistically evidenced, particularly amongst males. Primarily evidenced is the tendency for speakers to attempt to make salient phonological contrasts more prominent while also engaging in global clear speech modifications. Notably, the potential for vowel space expansion to be vowel inventory size dependent is also brought to the forefront. </div> </div> </div>