Listeners normalize speech for contextual speech rate even without an explicit recognition task

Speech can be produced at different rates. Listeners take this rate variation into account by normalizing vowel duration for contextual speech rate: An ambiguous Dutch word /m?t/ is perceived as short /mAt/ when embedded in a slow context, but long /ma:t/ in a fast context. Whilst some have argued that this rate normalization involves low-level automatic perceptual processing, there is also evidence that it arises at higher-level cognitive processing stages, such as decision making. Prior research on rate-dependent speech perception has only used explicit recognition tasks to investigate the phenomenon, involving both perceptual processing and decision making. This study tested whether speech rate normalization can be observed without explicit decision making, using a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm. Results show that a fast precursor sentence makes an embedded ambiguous prime (/m?t/) sound (implicitly) more /a:/-like, facilitating lexical access to the long target word "maat" in a (explicit) lexical decision task. This result suggests that rate normalization is automatic, taking place even in the absence of an explicit recognition task. Thus, rate normalization is placed within the realm of everyday spoken conversation, where explicit categorization of ambiguous sounds is rare

Responding to accents after experiencing interactive or mediated speech

Very little known is about how speakers learn about and/or respond to speech experienced without the possibility for interaction. This paper reports an experiment which considers the effects of two kinds of exposure to speech (interactive or non-interactive mediated) on Scottish English speakers’ responses to another accent (Southern British English), for two processing tasks, phonological awareness and speech production. Only marginal group effects are found according to exposure type. The main findings show a difference between subjects according to exposure type before exposure, and individual shifts in responses to speech according to exposure type

Production and perception of speaker-specific phonetic detail at word boundaries

Experiments show that learning about familiar voices affects speech processing in many tasks. However, most studies focus on isolated phonemes or words and do not explore which phonetic properties are learned about or retained in memory. This work investigated inter-speaker phonetic variation involving word boundaries, and its perceptual consequences. A production experiment found significant variation in the extent to which speakers used a number of acoustic properties to distinguish junctural minimal pairs e.g. 'So he diced them'—'So he'd iced them'. A perception experiment then tested intelligibility in noise of the junctural minimal pairs before and after familiarisation with a particular voice. Subjects who heard the same voice during testing as during the familiarisation period showed significantly more improvement in identification of words and syllable constituents around word boundaries than those who heard different voices. These data support the view that perceptual learning about the particular pronunciations associated with individual speakers helps listeners to identify syllabic structure and the location of word boundaries

Speaker-normalized sound representations in the human auditory cortex

The acoustic dimensions that distinguish speech sounds (like the vowel differences in “boot” and “boat”) also differentiate speakers’ voices. Therefore, listeners must normalize across speakers without losing linguistic information. Past behavioral work suggests an important role for auditory contrast enhancement in normalization: preceding context affects listeners’ perception of subsequent speech sounds. Here, using intracranial electrocorticography in humans, we investigate whether and how such context effects arise in auditory cortex. Participants identified speech sounds that were preceded by phrases from two different speakers whose voices differed along the same acoustic dimension as target words (the lowest resonance of the vocal tract). In every participant, target vowels evoke a speaker-dependent neural response that is consistent with the listener’s perception, and which follows from a contrast enhancement model. Auditory cortex processing thus displays a critical feature of normalization, allowing listeners to extract meaningful content from the voices of diverse speakers

Sociolinguistic Conditioning of Phonetic Category Realisation in Non-Native Speech

The realisation of phonetic categories reflects a complex relationship between individual phonetic parameters and both linguistic and extra-linguistic conditioning of language usage. The present paper investigates the effect of selected socio-linguistic variables, such as the age, the amount of language use and cultural/social distance in English used by Polish immigrants to the U.S. Individual parameters used in the realisation of the category ‘voice’ have been found to vary in their sensitivity to extra-linguistic factors: while the production of target-like values of all parameters is related to the age, it is the closure duration that is most stable in the correspondence to the age and level of language proficiency. The VOT and vowel duration, on the other hand, prove to be more sensitive to the amount of language use and attitudinal factors

Phonological Factors Affecting L1 Phonetic Realization of Proficient Polish Users of English

Acoustic phonetic studies examine the L1 of Polish speakers with professional level proficiency in English. The studies include two tasks, a production task carried out entirely in Polish and a phonetic code-switching task in which speakers insert target Polish words or phrases into an English carrier. Additionally, two phonetic parameters are studied: the oft-investigated VOT, as well as glottalization vs. sandhi linking of word-initial vowels. In monolingual Polish mode, L2 interference was observed for the VOT parameter, but not for sandhi linking. It is suggested that this discrepancy may be related to the differing phonological status of the two phonetic parameters. In the code-switching tasks, VOTs were on the whole more English-like than in monolingual mode, but this appeared to be a matter of individual performance. An increase in the rate of sandhi linking in the code-switches, except for the case of one speaker, appeared to be a function of accelerated production of L1 target items

Cortical representations for phonological quantity

Different languages use temporal speech cues in different linguistic functions. In Finnish, speech-sound duration is used as the primary cue for the phonological quantity distinction ― i.e., a distinction between short and long phonemes. For the second-language (L2) learners of Finnish, quantity is often difficult to master if speech-sound duration plays a less important role in the phonology of their native language (L1). The present studies aimed to investigate the cortical representations for phonological quantity in native speakers and L2 users of Finnish by using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Since long-term memory representations for different speech units have been previously shown to participate in the elicitation of the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response, MMN was used to compare the neural representation for quantity between native speakers and L2 users of Finnish. The results of the studies suggested that native Finnish speakers' MMN response to quantity was determined by the activation of native-language phonetic prototypes rather than by phoneme boundaries. In addition, native speakers seemed to process phoneme quantity and quality independently from each other by separate brain representations. The cross-linguistic MMN studies revealed that, in native speakers of Finnish, the MMN response to duration or quantity-degree changes was enhanced in amplitude selectively in speech sounds, whereas this pattern was not observed in L2 users. Native speakers' MMN enhancement is suggested to be due to the pre-attentive activation of L1 prototypes for quantity. In L2 users, the activation of L2 prototypes or other L2 learning effects were not reflected in the MMN, with one exception. Even though L2 users failed to show native-like brain responses to duration changes in a vowel that was similar in L1 and L2, their duration MMN response was native-like for an L2 vowel with no counterpart in L1. Thus, the pre-attentive activation of L2 users' representations was determined by the degree of similarity of L2 sounds to L1 sounds. In addition, behavioral experiments suggested that the establishment of representations for L2 quantity may require several years of language exposure.Eri kielet käyttävät äänteiden kestovihjeitä erilaisissa kielellisissä tehtävissä. Suomessa äänteen kesto on kvantiteetin eli lyhyiden ja pitkien foneemien erottamisen tärkein vihje. Suomea toisena kielenä puhuvien on usein vaikea oppia kvantiteetti, jos äänteen kestolla on vähäisempi merkitys heidän äidinkielessään. Tämän väitöskirjan tutkimuksissa tarkasteltiin aivovastemittausten ja foneettisten testien avulla kvantiteettikategorioiden muistijälkiä äidinkieleltään suomenkielisten ja suomea toisena kielenä puhuvien aivokuorella. Koska äänteiden pitkäkestoisten muistijälkien on aiemmin todettu osallistuvan MMN-aivovasteen (engl. mismatch negativity) syntymiseen, sitä käytettiin selvittämään, miten äidinkieleltään suomenkielisten ja suomea toisena kielenä puhvien kvantiteettikategorioiden muistijäljet poikkeavat toisistaan. Tulosten mukaan äidinkieleltään suomenkielisten MMN-vasteen voimakkuus määräytyi äidinkielen foneettisten prototyyppien mukaan eikä foneemien rajojen mukaan. Lisäksi suomenkieliset näyttivät käsittelevän foneemin laadun ja kvantiteetin toisistaan riippumattomasti, eri kategorioiden kautta. Kieliryhmiä vertailevat MMN-tutkimukset puolestaan osoittivat, että äidinkieleltään suomenkielisillä MMN-vaste keston muutokselle oli nimenomaan puheäänteiden kohdalla voimakkaampi kuin toisen kielen oppijoilla. Tämä saattaa johtua foneettisten prototyyppien esitietoisesta aktivoitumisesta äidinkieleltään suomenkielisten aivokuorella. Toisen kielen oppijoilla toisen kielen prototyyppien aktivoituminen tai kielenoppiminen ylipäänsä eivät näkyneet MMN-vasteessa yhtä poikkeusta lukuun ottamatta. Vaikka suomea toisena kielenä puhuvien aivovasteiden voimakkuus äänteen keston muutokselle ei saavuttanut äidinkielisten tasoa vokaalissa, joka oli samankaltainen heidän äidinkielessään ja toisessa kielessään, he saavuttivat suomenkielisten tason vokaalissa, jolla ei ollut vastinetta heidän äidinkielessään. Näin ollen äidinkielen ja toisen kielen äänteiden samankaltaisuus näyttäisi vaikuttavan suomea toisena kielenä puhuvien muistijälkien esitietoiseen aktivoitumiseen. Tutkimuksen foneettisten kokeiden mukaan kategorioiden syntyminen toisen kielen kvantiteetille saattaa vaatia useiden vuosien altistusta toiselle kielelle

How visual cues to speech rate influence speech perception

Spoken words are highly variable and therefore listeners interpret speech sounds relative to the surrounding acoustic context, such as the speech rate of a preceding sentence. For instance, a vowel midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/ in Dutch is perceived as short /ɑ/ in the context of preceding slow speech, but as long /a:/ if preceded by a fast context. Despite the well-established influence of visual articulatory cues on speech comprehension, it remains unclear whether visual cues to speech rate also influence subsequent spoken word recognition. In two ‘Go Fish’-like experiments, participants were presented with audio-only (auditory speech + fixation cross), visual-only (mute videos of talking head), and audiovisual (speech + videos) context sentences, followed by ambiguous target words containing vowels midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/. In Experiment 1, target words were always presented auditorily, without visual articulatory cues. Although the audio-only and audiovisual contexts induced a rate effect (i.e., more long /a:/ responses after fast contexts), the visual-only condition did not. When, in Experiment 2, target words were presented audiovisually, rate effects were observed in all three conditions, including visual-only. This suggests that visual cues to speech rate in a context sentence influence the perception of following visual target cues (e.g., duration of lip aperture), which at an audiovisual integration stage bias participants’ target categorization responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how what we see influences what we hear

On past participle agreement in transitive clauses in French

This paper provides a Minimalist analysis of past participle agreement in French in transitive clauses. Our account posits that the head v of vP in such structures carries an (accusativeassigning) structural case feature which may apply (with or without concomitant agreement) to case-mark a clause-mate object, the subject of a defective complement clause, or an intermediate copy of a preposed subject in spec-CP. In structures where a goal is extracted from vP (e.g. via wh-movement) v also carries an edge feature, and may also carry a specificity feature and a set of (number and gender) agreement features. We show how these assumptions account for agreement of a participle with a preposed specific clausemate object or defective-clause subject, and for the absence of agreement with an embedded object, with the complement of an impersonal verb, and with the subject of an embedded (finite or nonfinite) CP complement. We also argue that the absence of agreement marking (in expected contexts) on the participles faitmade and laissélet in infinitive structures is essentially viral in nature. Finally, we claim that obligatory participle agreement with reflexive and reciprocal objects arises because the derivation of reflexives involves A-movement and concomitant agreement

The phonetics of second language learning and bilingualism

This chapter provides an overview of major theories and findings in the field of second language (L2) phonetics and phonology. Four main conceptual frameworks are discussed and compared: the Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2, the Native Language Magnet Theory, the Automatic Selection Perception Model, and the Speech Learning Model. These frameworks differ in terms of their empirical focus, including the type of learner (e.g., beginner vs. advanced) and target modality (e.g., perception vs. production), and in terms of their theoretical assumptions, such as the basic unit or window of analysis that is relevant (e.g., articulatory gestures, position-specific allophones). Despite the divergences among these theories, three recurring themes emerge from the literature reviewed. First, the learning of a target L2 structure (segment, prosodic pattern, etc.) is influenced by phonetic and/or phonological similarity to structures in the native language (L1). In particular, L1-L2 similarity exists at multiple levels and does not necessarily benefit L2 outcomes. Second, the role played by certain factors, such as acoustic phonetic similarity between close L1 and L2 sounds, changes over the course of learning, such that advanced learners may differ from novice learners with respect to the effect of a specific variable on observed L2 behavior. Third, the connection between L2 perception and production (insofar as the two are hypothesized to be linked) differs significantly from the perception-production links observed in L1 acquisition. In service of elucidating the predictive differences among these theories, this contribution discusses studies that have investigated L2 perception and/or production primarily at a segmental level. In addition to summarizing the areas in which there is broad consensus, the chapter points out a number of questions which remain a source of debate in the field today.https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHAccepted manuscriptAccepted manuscrip