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      Variation in children’s vowel production: Effects of language exposure and lexical frequency

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          Abstract

          According to usage-based models of phonology, the more frequently a word is used and perceived in accented pronunciation variants, the more exemplars of accented tokens are stored and then used for subsequent productions of this word. This may lead to greater production variability in speakers with more variable input than in speakers with less variable input (cf. Pierrehumbert, 2001). This contrasts with abstractionist theories and with proposals according to which children unconsciously filter out accent features. This study assesses the effects of variable input and lexical frequency on speech production by children (mean age 9;10) growing up with one or more languages and with exposure to regional varieties and foreign accents. In a picture-naming task, 60 children were tested on their production of eight German vowels. Children who experience more input variability produced more variable vowels in terms of greater Euclidean distances. Vowels in frequent words were produced with more variability than in infrequent words. Vowel position (F1) differed depending on language background (monolingual versus bilingual) and amount of input in regional varieties. The results imply that greater input variation can account for variable vowel production, in line with usage-based theories.

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          Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal.

          Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the standards that have been in place for many decades. Through theoretical arguments and Monte Carlo simulation, we show that LMEMs generalize best when they include the maximal random effects structure justified by the design. The generalization performance of LMEMs including data-driven random effects structures strongly depends upon modeling criteria and sample size, yielding reasonable results on moderately-sized samples when conservative criteria are used, but with little or no power advantage over maximal models. Finally, random-intercepts-only LMEMs used on within-subjects and/or within-items data from populations where subjects and/or items vary in their sensitivity to experimental manipulations always generalize worse than separate F 1 and F 2 tests, and in many cases, even worse than F 1 alone. Maximal LMEMs should be the 'gold standard' for confirmatory hypothesis testing in psycholinguistics and beyond.
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            Balancing Type I error and power in linear mixed models

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              A theory of lexical access in speech production

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                1868-6354
                Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
                Ubiquity Press
                1868-6354
                22 May 2019
                2019
                : 10
                : 1
                : 9
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRK “Frequency effects in language,” University of Freiburg, DE
                [2 ]German Department, University of Freiburg, DE
                [3 ]Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), Freiburg, DE
                Article
                10.5334/labphon.131
                54473aac-d12d-4762-b6bd-ebb169099026
                Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 15 December 2017
                : 26 March 2019
                Categories
                Journal article

                Applied linguistics,General linguistics,Linguistics & Semiotics
                regional varieties,foreign accents,bilingualism,school-aged children,Vowel production,input variation,lexical frequency

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