Topic- and Stance-based Style Shift of North Korean Speakers Living in South Korea

We investigate to what extent North Korean refugee (NK) speakers shift their stop production across topic and stance in conversational speech. The twenty-two NK speakers (F:16, M:6) were engaged in a sociolinguistic interview. A total of 5042 stops were identified and analyzed for VOT and F0 in the following vowel. Stops in the sociolinguistic interview data were coded for topic-stance: contingent upon the topic, North (NK) or South Korean (SK) related topics, they responded with a positive, negative, or neutral stance. Based on previous findings, we predicted that NK speakers would produce more SK-like stops when speaking about South Korea with a positive stance (Nycz 2018). Results of mixed-effects models showed that the NK speakers produced more SK-like stops in terms of VOT when talking about NK and SK topics with emotional stance (negative and positive). This is inconsistent with the idea that speaking about the second dialect region with a positive stance typically results in more second dialect-like speech (Nycz 2018). Unlike the VOT results, the NK F0 patterns were consistent across topic-stance. We interpreted that the consistent F0 patterns might be due to prosodic mitigation (Idemaru et al. 2019, Hübscher et al. 2017). Given that speakers tend not to fluctuate F0 in polite speech, the NK speakers might also try to speak more politely because the NK speakers communicated with an unfamiliar SK interviewer (the first author), using honorific speech forms. Taken together, the findings show NK speakers\u27 mixed pattern of stop productions across topic-stance. Effects of interlocutor and speech address form can be examined in order to further shed light on the complex pattern in a future study

Speaking rate normalization across different talkers in the perception of Japanese stop and vowel length contrasts

7 pagesPerception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners’ perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers’ speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process that happens in the early phase of perception

Dimension-selective attention as a possible driver of dynamic, context-dependent re-weighting in speech processing

The contribution of acoustic dimensions to an auditory percept is dynamically adjusted and reweighted based on prior experience about how informative these dimensions are across the long-term and short-term environment. This is especially evident in speech perception, where listeners differentially weight information across multiple acoustic dimensions, and use this information selectively to update expectations about future sounds. The dynamic and selective adjustment of how acoustic input dimensions contribute to perception has made it tempting to conceive of this as a form of non-spatial auditory selective attention. Here, we review several human speech perception phenomena that might be consistent with auditory selective attention although, as of yet, the literature does not definitively support a mechanistic tie. We relate these human perceptual phenomena to illustrative nonhuman animal neurobiological findings that offer informative guideposts in how to test mechanistic connections. We next present a novel empirical approach that can serve as a methodological bridge from human research to animal neurobiological studies. Finally, we describe four preliminary results that demonstrate its utility in advancing understanding of human non-spatial dimension-based auditory selective attention