Analyzing Nonverbal Listener Responses using Parallel Recordings of Multiple Listeners

In this paper we study nonverbal listener responses on a corpus with multiple parallel recorded listeners. These listeners were meant to believe that they were the sole listener, while in fact there were three persons listening to the same speaker. The speaker could only see one of the listeners. We analyze the impact of the particular setup of the corpus on the behavior and perception of the two types of listeners; the listeners that could be seen by the speaker and the listeners that could not be seen. Furthermore we compare the nonverbal listening behaviors of these three listeners to each other with regard to timing and form. We correlate these behaviors with behaviors of the speaker, like pauses and whether the speaker is looking at the listeners or not

Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental cues to English stress

Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in identifying syllable stress in English. This is because lexical stress is more useful in recognition of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0 especially, correlate with data of earlier listening experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch responses were not paralleled in data from native listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish English primary versus secondary stress are better exploited by Dutch than by native listeners

Metacognitive instruction does improve listening comprehension

This paper reports on a small-scale study, which looked into the impact of metacognitive instruction on listeners’ comprehension. Twenty-eight adult, Iranian, high-intermediate level EFL listeners participated in a “strategy-based” approach of advance organisation, directed attention, selective attention, and self-management in each of four listening lessons focused on improving listeners’ comprehension of IELTS listening texts. A comparison of pretest and posttest scores showed that the “less-skilled” listeners improved more than “more-skilled” listeners in the IELTS listening tests. Findings also supported the view that metacognitive instruction assisted listeners in considering the process of listening input and promoting listening comprehension ability

The Listeners -Misinterpreted

Once upon a time, the editor of a metropolitan daily newspaper sent out three journalists to bring back a story..

Trick or treat? Adaptation to Italian-accented English speech by native English, Italian, and Dutch listeners

English is spoken worldwide by both native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers. It is therefore imperative to establish how easily L1 and L2 speakers understand each other. We know that L1 listeners adapt to foreign-accented speech very rapidly (Clarke & Garrett, 2004), and L2 listeners find L2 speakers (from matched and mismatched L1 backgrounds) as intelligible as native speakers (Bent & Bradlow, 2003). But foreign-accented speech can deviate widely from L1 pronunciation norms, for example when adult L2 learners experience difficulties in producing L2 phonemes that are not part of their native repertoire (Strange, 1995). For instance, Italian L2 learners of English often lengthen the lax English vowel /I/, making it sound more like the tense vowel /i/ (Flege et al., 1999). This blurs the distinction between words such as bin and bean. Unless listeners are able to adapt to this kind of pronunciation variance, it would hinder word recognition by both L1 and L2 listeners (e.g., /bin/ could mean either bin or bean). In this study we investigate whether Italian-accented English interferes with on-line word recognition for native English listeners and for nonnative English listeners, both those where the L1 matches the speaker accent (i.e., Italian listeners) and those with an L1 mismatch (i.e., Dutch listeners). Second, we test whether there is perceptual adaptation to the Italian-accented speech during the experiment in each of the three listener groups. Participants in all groups took part in the same cross-modal priming experiment. They heard spoken primes and made lexical decisions to printed targets, presented at the acoustic offset of the prime. The primes, spoken by a native Italian, consisted of 80 English words, half with /I/ in their standard pronunciation but mispronounced with an /i/ (e.g., trick spoken as treek), and half with /i/ in their standard pronunciation and pronounced correctly (e.g., treat). These words also appeared as targets, following either a related prime (which was either identical, e.g., treat-treat, or mispronounced, e.g., treek-trick) or an unrelated prime. All three listener groups showed identity priming (i.e., faster decisions to treat after hearing treat than after an unrelated prime), both overall and in each of the two halves of the experiment. In addition, the Italian listeners showed mispronunciation priming (i.e., faster decisions to trick after hearing treek than after an unrelated prime) in both halves of the experiment, while the English and Dutch listeners showed mispronunciation priming only in the second half of the experiment. These results suggest that Italian listeners, prior to the experiment, have learned to deal with Italian-accented English, and that English and Dutch listeners, during the experiment, can rapidly adapt to Italian-accented English. For listeners already familiar with a particular accent (e.g., through their own pronunciation), it appears that they have already learned how to interpret words with mispronounced vowels. Listeners who are less familiar with a foreign accent can quickly adapt to the way a particular speaker with that accent talks, even if that speaker is not talking in the listeners’ native language

Segmentation of the Accentual Phrase in Seoul Korean

Pairs of phonemically identical utterances with different location of an Accentual Phrase boundary were presented to listeners. When duration and/or F0 were swapped between the utterances within a pair, only F0 change elicited changes in listeners’ responses. This effect was found regardless of the distribution of strong consonants which raise Accentual Phrase initial F0. On the other hand, listeners seemed to be sensitive to a few cases with segmental-prosodic mismatches

Talker identification is not improved by lexical access in the absence of familiar phonology

Listeners identify talkers more accurately when they are familiar with both the sounds and words of the language being spoken. It is unknown whether lexical information alone can facilitate talker identification in the absence of familiar phonology. To dissociate the roles of familiar words and phonology, we developed English-Mandarin “hybrid” sentences, spoken in Mandarin, which can be convincingly coerced to sound like English when presented with corresponding subtitles (e.g., “wei4 gou3 chi1 kao3 li2 zhi1” becomes “we go to college”). Across two experiments, listeners learned to identify talkers in three conditions: listeners' native language (English), an unfamiliar, foreign language (Mandarin), and a foreign language paired with subtitles that primed native language lexical access (subtitled Mandarin). In Experiment 1 listeners underwent a single session of talker identity training; in Experiment 2 listeners completed three days of training. Talkers in a foreign language were identified no better when native language lexical representations were primed (subtitled Mandarin) than from foreign-language speech alone, regardless of whether they had received one or three days of talker identity training. These results suggest that the facilitatory effect of lexical access on talker identification depends on the availability of familiar phonological forms

Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners

This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness

Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping

Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage [1, 2]; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements [3]. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and statistical cues [5, 9] are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language