Lexical stress information modulates the time-course of spoken-word recognition

Segmental as well as suprasegmental information is used by Dutch listeners to recognize words. The time-course of the effect of suprasegmental stress information on spoken-word recognition was investigated in a previous study, in which we tracked Dutch listeners' looks to arrays of four printed words as they listened to spoken sentences. Each target was displayed along with a competitor that did not differ segmentally in its first two syllables but differed in stress placement (e.g., 'CENtimeter' and 'sentiMENT'). The listeners' eye-movements showed that stress information is used to recognize the target before distinct segmental information is available. Here, we examine the role of durational information in this effect. Two experiments showed that initial-syllable duration, as a cue to lexical stress, is not interpreted dependent on the speaking rate of the preceding carrier sentence. This still held when other stress cues like pitch and amplitude were removed. Rather, the speaking rate of the preceding carrier affected the speed of word recognition globally, even though the rate of the target itself was not altered. Stress information modulated lexical competition, but did so independently of the rate of the preceding carrier, even if duration was the only stress cue present

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

Phonetic content influences voice discriminability

We present results from an experiment which shows that voice perception is influenced by the phonetic content of speech. Dutch listeners were presented with thirteen speakers pronouncing CVC words with systematically varying segmental content, and they had to discriminate the speakers’ voices. Results show that certain segments help listeners discriminate voices more than other segments do. Voice information can be extracted from every segmental position of a monosyllabic word and is processed rapidly. We also show that although relative discriminability within a closed set of voices appears to be a stable property of a voice, it is also influenced by segmental cues – that is, perceived uniqueness of a voice depends on what that voice says

Exploring the IT usage in SMEs from New Zealand, Columbia and Chile using action-research methodology

The theory on the adoption and use of information technology (IT) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is abundant. However, methodologically speaking, action-research (AR) has been little explored as a method of construction of this theory, despite the use of this methodology could improve understanding of how SMEs use IT. Therefore, we researched the use of IT in SMEs using a methodology adapted from AR. The methodology was tested in companies from New Zealand, Colombia and Chile. The use of this methodology was well evaluated by the top management of SMEs, in fact, the recommendations coming from the analysis were well received by the management of participants. These results are auspicious regarding the use of AR in SMEs and could help encourage other researchers to use this methodology, which remains little used in information systems research

Overcoming change fatigue: lessons from Glasgow's National Health Service

Structured Abstract Purpose of this paper This paper explores the practicalities of organizational change in complex settings where much change has already occurred. It therefore offers insights into tackling and overcoming change fatigue. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a longitudinal study of change within a healthcare organization. The paper draws on interviews, focus groups and observations during a 2.5 year long action research project. Findings The paper reports findings on the speed at which change takes place, the importance of communication and the burden placed on senior officers during such communication and consultation processes, the use of appropriate external resources and expertise, the benefits of sharing best practice across sectors and the role of academic researchers in change processes. What is original/value of paper The paper offers valuable insights to those charged with effecting organizational change in change fatigued settings

Coping with speaker-related variation via abstract phonemic categories

Listeners can cope with considerable variation in the way that different speakers talk. We argue here that they can do so because of a process of phonological abstraction in the speech-recognition system. We review evidence that listeners adjust the bounds of phonemic categories after only very limited exposure to a deviant realisation of a given phoneme. This learning can be talker-specific and is stable over time; further, the learning generalizes to previously unheard words containing the deviant phoneme. Together these results suggest that the learning involves adjustment of prelexical phonemic representations which mediate between the speech signal and the mental lexicon during word recognition. We argue that such an abstraction process is inconsistent with claims made by some recent models of language processing that the mental lexicon consists solely of multiple detailed traces of acoustic episodes. Simulations with a purely episodic model without functional prelexical abstraction confirm that such a model cannot account for the evidence on lexical generalization of perceptual learning. We conclude that abstract phonemic categories form a necessary part of lexical access, and that the ability to store talker-specific knowledge about those categories provides listeners with the means to deal with cross-talker variation

Al sprekende leert men [Inaugural lecture]

Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Leren en plasticiteit aan de Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op donderdag 1 oktober 200

Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific