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Listen, Repeat, Decide: Investigating Pronunciation Variation in Spoken Word Recognition among Russian Speakers

Variability is one of the important features of natural speech and a challenge for spoken word recognition models and automatic speech recognition systems. We conducted two preliminary experiments aimed at finding out whether native Russian speakers regard differently certain types of pronunciation variation when the variants are equally possible according to orthoepic norms. In the first experiment, the participants had to repeat the words with three different types of pronunciation variability. In the second experiment, we focused on the assessment of words with variable and only one standard stress. Our results support the hypothesis that listeners pay the most attention to words with variable stress, less to the variability of soft and hard consonants, and even less to the presence / absence of /j/. Assessing the correct pronunciation of words with variable stress takes significantly more time than assessing words which have only one correct pronunciation variant. These preliminary results show that pronunciation variants can provide new evidence on how a listener access the mental lexicon during natural speech processing and chooses among the variants stored in it.