Listeners don’t need vowel centers to hear a regional accent

Stella Takvoryan and Kevin McGowan have been working on a project to replicate and extend Strange et al. (1983), which found that listeners do not need vowel centers (the middle 50% of lax vowels or the middle 65% of tense vowels) to accurately identify words like bit, bait, and bet. Our lab added a second manipulation to the original paradigm, asking listeners if they could tell where the talker was from on some trials and what they were saying on others. The first results from this study are in and were presented at the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting in New Orleans. poster webpage and pdf

References

Strange, W., Jenkins, J. J., & Johnson, T. L. (1983). Dynamic specification of coarticulated vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 74(3), 695–705. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.389855