Short-and medium-term plasticity for speaker adaptation seem to be independent

The author wishes to thank James McQueen and Elizabeth Johnson for comments made on an earlier drafts of this paper.In a classic paper, Ladefoged and Broadbent [1] showed that listeners adapt to speakers based on short-term exposure of a single phrase. Recently, Norris, McQueen, and Cutler [2] presented evidence for a lexically conditioned medium-term adaptation to a particular speaker based on an exposure of 40 critical words among 200 items. In two experiments, I investigated whether there is a connection between the two findings. To this end, a vowel-normalization paradigm (similar to [1]) was used with a carrier phrase that consisted of either words or nonwords. The range of the second formant was manipulated and this affected the perception of a target vowel in a compensatory fashion: A low F2-range made it more likely that a target vowel was perceived as a front vowel, that is, with an inherently high F2. Manipulation of the lexical status of the carrier phrase, however, did not affect vowel normalization. In contrast, the range of vowels in the carrier phrase did influence vowel normalization. If the carrier phrase consisted of high-front vowels only, vowel categories shifted only for high-front vowels. This may indicate that the short-term and medium-term adaptations are brought about by different mechanisms.peer-reviewe

The Politeness Prosody of the Javanese Directive Speech

This experimental phonetic research deals with the prosodies of directive speech in Javanese. The research procedures were: (1) speech production, (2) acoustic analysis, and (3) perception test. The data investigated are three directive utterances, in the form of statements, commands, and questions. The data were obtained by recording dialogues that present polite as well as impolite speech. Three acoustic experiments were conducted for statements, commands, and questions in directive speech: (1) modifications of duration, (2) modifications of contour, and (3) modifications of fundamental frequency. The result of the subsequent perception tests to 90 stimuli with 24 subjects were analysed statistically with ANOVA (Analysis of Variant). Based on this statistic analysis, the prosodic characteristics of polite and impolite speech were identified

The Influence of Social Priming on Speech Perception

Speech perception relies on auditory, visual, and motor cues and has been historically difficult to model, partially due to this multimodality. One of the current models is the Fuzzy Logic Model of Perception (FLMP), which suggests that if one of these types of speech mode is altered, the perception of that speech signal should be altered in a quantifiable and predictable way. The current study uses social priming to activate the schema of blindness in order to reduce reliance of visual cues of syllables with a visually identical pair. According to the FLMP, by lowering reliance on visual cues, visual confusion should also be reduced, allowing the visually confusable syllables to be identified more quickly. Although no main effect of priming was discovered, some individual syllables showed the expected facilitation while others showed inhibition. These results suggest that there is an effect of social priming on speech perception, despite the opposing reactions between syllables. Further research should use a similar kind of social priming to determine which syllables have more acoustically salient features and which have more visually salient features

Speech perception abilities of adults with dyslexia: is there any evidence for a true deficit?

PURPOSE: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. METHOD: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a pea/bee voicing contrast was evaluated using adaptive identification and discrimination tasks, presented in quiet and in noise, and a fixed-step discrimination task. Two further tests of word perception in noise were presented. RESULTS: There were no significant group differences for categorization in quiet or noise, across- and within-category discrimination as measured adaptively, or word perception, but average readers showed better across- and within-category discrimination in the fixed-step discrimination task. Individuals did not show consistent poor performance across related tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The small number of group differences, and lack of consistent poor individual performance, suggests weak support for a speech perception deficit in dyslexia. It seems likely that at least some poor performances are attributable to nonsensory factors like attention. It may also be that some individuals with dyslexia have speech perceptual acuity that is at the lower end of the normal range and exacerbated by nonsensory factors

The Control of Foreign Funds by the United States Treasury

The general aim of this thesis was to test the effects of paralinguistic (emotional) and prior contextual (topical) cues on perception of poorly specified visual, auditory, and audiovisual speech. The specific purposes were to (1) examine if facially displayed emotions can facilitate speechreading performance; (2) to study the mechanism for such facilitation; (3) to map information-processing factors that are involved in processing of poorly specified speech; and (4) to present a comprehensive conceptual framework for speech perception, with specification of the signal being considered. Experi¬mental and correlational designs were used, and 399 normal-hearing adults participated in seven experiments. The main conclusions are summarised as follows. (a) Speechreading can be facilitated by paralinguistic information as constituted by facial displayed emotions. (b) The facilitatory effect of emitted emotional cues is mediated by their degree of specification in transmission and ambiguity as percepts; and by how distinct the perceived emotions combined with topical cues are as cues for lexical access. (c) The facially displayed emotions affect speech perception by conveying semantic cues; no effect via enhanced articulatory distinctiveness, nor of emotion-related state in the perceiver is needed for facilitation. (d) The combined findings suggest that emotional and topical cues provide constraints for activation spreading in the lexicon. (e) Both bottom-up and top-down factors are associated with perception of poorly specified speech, indicating that variation in information-processing abilities is a crucial factor for perception if there is paucity in sensory input. A conceptual framework for speech perception, comprising specification of the linguistic and paralinguistic information, as well as distinctiveness of primes, is presented. Generalisations of the findings to other forms of paralanguage and language processing are discussed

The Politeness Prosody of the Javanese Directive Speech

This experimental phonetic research deals with the prosodies of directive speech in Javanese. The research procedures were: (1) speech production, (2) acoustic analysis, and (3) perception test. The data investigated are three directive utterances, in the form of statements, commands, and questions. The data were obtained by recording dialogues that present polite as well as impolite speech. Three acoustic experiments were conducted for statements, commands, and questions in directive speech: (1) modifications of duration, (2) modifications of contour, and (3) modifications of fundamental frequency. The result of the subsequent perception tests to 90 stimuli with 24 subjects were analysed statistically with ANOVA (Analysis of Variant). Based on this statistic analysis, the prosodic characteristics of polite and impolite speech were identified

Contributions of temporal encodings of voicing, voicelessness, fundamental frequency, and amplitude variation to audiovisual and auditory speech perception

Auditory and audio-visual speech perception was investigated using auditory signals of invariant spectral envelope that temporally encoded the presence of voiced and voiceless excitation, variations in amplitude envelope and F-0. In experiment 1, the contribution of the timing of voicing was compared in consonant identification to the additional effects of variations in F-0 and the amplitude of voiced speech. In audio-visual conditions only, amplitude variation slightly increased accuracy globally and for manner features. F-0 variation slightly increased overall accuracy and manner perception in auditory and audio-visual conditions. Experiment 2 examined consonant information derived from the presence and amplitude variation of voiceless speech in addition to that from voicing, F-0, and voiced speech amplitude. Binary indication of voiceless excitation improved accuracy overall and for voicing and manner. The amplitude variation of voiceless speech produced only a small increment in place of articulation scores. A final experiment examined audio-visual sentence perception using encodings of voiceless excitation and amplitude variation added to a signal representing voicing and F-0. There was a contribution of amplitude variation to sentence perception, but not of voiceless excitation. The timing of voiced and voiceless excitation appears to be the major temporal cues to consonant identity. (C) 1999 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966(99)01410-1]

Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: a comparison using printed word eye-tracking

The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception