Tuning reflects the speaker s tacit awareness of the listener s access to signal independent information.
Output varies along a hyper and hypospeech continuum.
Speakers aim for sufficient discriminability Lack of invariance in the signal is a direct consequence of this adaptive organization. Two Main Observations 1. Auditory similarity to other words in the neighborhood High frequency words are discriminated more easily. Words with many phonetic neighbors with more difficulty. Lindblom Table 1 here 2.