Effect of Accent Perception on the Perception of Professionalism

This study explores how people’s perceptions of speakers’ accents may be related to their perceptions of speakers’ professional characteristics. Sociolinguistic research continues to highlight that the ways listeners perceive accents and the ways they perceive the people who use those accents are intertwined. In addition, accent discrimination is often an underlooked form of discrimination in various aspects of society, including in workplace situations – from interview success to upward mobility. The U.S. judicial system, in theory, condemns discrimination based on national origin, race, socioeconomic status, etc. but, in reality, provides leeway for employers to discriminate based on language and uphold beliefs in standard language ideology. In the U.S., English speakers tend to view non-native English speakers as less credible or believable than native English speakers, but few other studies have explored this relationship between accent perception and the perception of personal characteristics. Our study contributes to sociolinguistic research on accent perception by exploring how accentedness interacts with the perception of specific character traits prioritized in professional situations: professionalism, confidence, believability, knowledgeability, and level of experience

Intelligibility of medically related sentences in quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise

Noise in healthcare settings, such as hospitals, often exceeds levels recommended by health organizations. Although researchers and medical professionals have raised concerns about the effect of these noise levels on spoken communication, objective measures of behavioral intelligibility in hospital noise are lacking. Further, no studies of intelligibility in hospital noise used medically relevant terminology, which may differentially impact intelligibility compared to standard terminology in speech perception research and is essential for ensuring ecological validity. Here, intelligibility was measured using online testing for 69 young adult listeners in three listening conditions (i.e., quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise: 23 listeners per condition) for four sentence types. Three sentence types included medical terminology with varied lexical frequency and familiarity characteristics. A final sentence set included non-medically related sentences. Results showed that intelligibility was negatively impacted by both noise types with no significant difference between the hospital and speech-shaped noise. Medically related sentences were not less intelligible overall, but word recognition accuracy was significantly positively correlated with both lexical frequency and familiarity. These results support the need for continued research on how noise levels in healthcare settings in concert with less familiar medical terminology impact communications and ultimately health outcomes

Constraints on variability in the voice onset time of L2 English stop consonants

Non-native speech production is frequently characterized by its deviation from native pronunciation. Among segments, previous work has largely focused on describing the separation between native and non-native speakers at the level of individual phonetic categories. An additional hallmark of L1 pronunciation is the presence of systematic relationships within and among phonetic categories. For example, mean voice onset times (VOT) strongly covary among aspirated stop consonants across L1 speakers of American English. The present study examined whether L2 English speakers from various L1 backgrounds differ from native speakers in the relationship of VOT among word-initial /ptk/. Despite differences in the overall realization, L2 speakers resembled native English speakers in the degree of VOT covariation between stop-specific means and variances, as well as between /ptk/. These findings have important implications for the perception of accented speech, as listeners could employ structured relationships to facilitate adaptation despite non-native realizations of individual phonetic categories

A New Corpus of Lexical Substitution and Word Blend Errors: Probing the Semantic Structure of Lemma Access Failures

Models of lemma access in language production predict occasional mis-selection of lemmas linked to highly similar concepts (synonyms) and concepts standing in a set-superset relation (subsumatives). It is unclear, however, if such errors occur in spontaneous speech, and if they do, whether humans can detect them given their minimal impact on sentence meaning. This data report examines a large corpus of English spontaneous speech errors and documents a low but non-negligible occurrence of these categories. The existence of synonym and subsumative errors is documented in a larger open access data set that supports a range of new investigations of the semantic structure of lexical substitution and word blend speech errors

Lexical Diversity, Lexical Sophistication, and Predictability for Speech in Multiple Listening Conditions

When talkers anticipate that a listener may have difficulty understanding their speech, they adopt a speaking style typically described as “clear speech.” This speaking style includes a variety of acoustic modifications and has perceptual benefits for listeners. In the present study, we examine whether clear speaking styles also include modulation of lexical items selected and produced during naturalistic conversations. Our results demonstrate that talkers do, indeed, modulate their lexical selection, as measured by a variety of lexical diversity and lexical sophistication indices. Further, the results demonstrate that clear speech is not a monolithic construct. Talkers modulate their speech differently depending on the communication situation. We suggest that clear speech should be conceptualized as a set of speaking styles, in which talkers take the listener and communication situation into consideration

Reverse production effect: Children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Stephanie Strahm, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced', Developmental Science, which has been published in final form at DOI 10.1111/desc.12636. Under embargo until 15 November 2018. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a blocked design. Immediately after training, children were tested on their recognition of the trained novel words using a preferential looking paradigm. In both experiments, children recognized novel words that were produced and heard during training, but demonstrated better recognition for items that were heard. These findings are opposite to previous results reported in the literature with adults and children. Our results show that benefits of speech production for word learning are dependent on factors such as task complexity and the developmental stage of the learner.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Lexical frequency effects on articulation:a comparison of picture naming and reading aloud

The present study investigated whether lexical frequency, a variable that is known to affect the time taken to utter a verbal response, may also influence articulation. Pairs of words that differed in terms of their relative frequency, but were matched on their onset, vowel, and number of phonemes (e.g. map vs. mat, where the former is more frequent than the latter) were used in a picture naming and a reading aloud task. Low-frequency items yielded slower response latencies than high-frequency items in both tasks, with the frequency effect being significantly larger in picture naming compared to reading aloud. Also, initial-phoneme durations were longer for low-frequency items than for high-frequency items. The frequency effect on initial-phoneme durations was slightly more prominent in picture naming than in reading aloud, yet its size was very small, thus preventing us from concluding that lexical frequency exerts an influence on articulation. Additionally, initial-phoneme and whole-word durations were significantly longer in reading aloud compared to picture naming. We discuss our findings in the context of current theories of reading aloud and speech production, and the approaches they adopt in relation to the nature of information flow (staged vs. cascaded) between cognitive and articulatory levels of processing

Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech

This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker

Stem similarity modulates infants' acquisition of phonological alternations

Phonemes have variant pronunciations depending on context. For instance, in American English, the [t] in pat [pæt] and the [d] in pad [pæd] are both realized with a tap [ɾ] when the –ing suffix is attached, [pæɾɪŋ]. We show that despite greater distributional and acoustic support for the [t]-tap alternation, 12-month-olds successfully relate taps to stems with a perceptually-similar final [d], not the dissimilar final-[t]. Thus, distributional learning of phonological alternations is constrained by infants' preference for the alternation of perceptually-similar segments. Further, the ability to relate variant surface forms emerges between 8- and 12-months. Our findings of biased learning provide further empirical support for a role for perceptual similarity in the acquisition of linguistically-relevant categories. We discuss the implications of our findings for phonological theory, language acquisition and models of the mental lexicon