Field Session 2011-10-12

adjective suffixes, determiners, syntaxecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Field Sessions 2011-09-07

consonant inventory, vowel inventory, phoneticsrecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Acoustic-phonetic and auditory mechanisms of adaptation in the perception of sibilant fricatives

Listeners are highly proficient at adapting to contextual variation when perceiving speech. In the present study, we examined the effects of brief speech and nonspeech contexts on the perception of sibilant fricatives. We explored three theoretically motivated accounts of contextual adaptation, based on phonetic cue calibration, phonetic covariation, and auditory contrast. Under the cue calibration account, listeners adapt by estimating a talker-specific average for each phonetic cue or dimension; under the cue covariation account, listeners adapt by exploiting consistencies in how the realization of speech sounds varies across talkers; under the auditory contrast account, adaptation results from (partial) masking of spectral components that are shared by adjacent stimuli. The spectral center of gravity, a phonetic cue to fricative identity, was manipulated for several types of context sound: /z/-initial syllables, /v/-initial syllables, and white noise matched in long-term average spectrum (LTAS) to the /z/-initial stimuli. Listeners’ perception of the /s/–/ʃ/ contrast was significantly influenced by /z/-initial syllables and LTAS-matched white noise stimuli, but not by /v/-initial syllables. No significant difference in adaptation was observed between exposure to /z/-initial syllables and matched white noise stimuli, and speech did not have a considerable advantage over noise when the two were presented consecutively within a context. The pattern of findings is most consistent with the auditory contrast account of short-term perceptual adaptation. The cue covariation account makes accurate predictions for speech contexts, but not for nonspeech contexts or for the absence of a speech-versus-nonspeech difference

Field Session 2011-11-16

recording of high front and back unrounded vowels following [k] and [q] in various wordsRecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Field Session 2011-10-19

tense, aspect, syntaxecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Field Session 2011-10-26

scope, tense, negationecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Field Methods 2011-10-17

We elicited how the possessives are expressed in Kazakh. Different tenses and aspects were also tested.ecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000

Field Session 2011-10-19

tense, aspect, syntaxecorder: Marantz Professional PMD 660, microphone: Audio-Technica ATM 75Recorded at Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, New York, NY 1000