A universal bias in adult vowel perception – By ear or by eye

Masapollo, Matthew; Polka, Linda; Ménard, Lucie

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.001

Cited by 10 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…However, an analysis of the subjects’ overall mean A’ scores over all trial types showed that they was significantly greater than would be expected by chance ( M = .83, SD = .08, t (19) = 17.506, p < 0.01, d = 3.92). Furthermore, the overall mean A’ scores in the present experiment were not significantly different from those reported in Masapollo et al .’s (2017b, English-speaking subjects only; M = .83, SD = .06) vowel discrimination tests ( t (33) = .058, p = .954, d = .01). Thus, subjects were treating these artificial tonal categories in a similar way to the speech categories that they were designed to emulate, at least at some level of auditory processing.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The stimuli were non-speech tones constructed to be similar to the center of the F 1 and F 2 formant paths of the natural English /u/ and French /u/ vowel stimuli used by Masapollo et al . (2017b, Experiment 1).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The goal of Experiment 1 was to examine whether the asymmetric discrimination of English /u/ and French /u/ vowels observed by Masapollo et al . (2017b; see Figure 1B) is also found with non-speech tonal-analogues designed to approximate some of their spectro-temporal properties without sounding like vowels.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Replicating Directional Asymmetries Using Non-mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another focus was on how factors such as phonological working memory capacity, attention, and particular task demands interact to influence asymmetries. This framework has been used to guide a number of recent studies of vowel perception with both adults and infants (see, e.g., Pons et al ., 2012; Tyler, Best, Faber, & Levitt, 2014; Kriengwatana & Escudero, 2017; Masapollo, Polka, Molnar, & Ménard, 2017a; Masapollo, Polka, & Ménard, 2017b; Masapollo, Polka, Ménard, Franklin, Tiede & Morgan, 2018; Masapollo, Franklin, Morgan & Polka, under review), which have informed our understanding of the nature of the interplay between initial discrimination abilities and biases and linguistic experience in vowel perception.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the magnitude of the asymmetry did not interact with native language. Masapollo et al . (2017b) replicated and extended these results using natural /u/ vowel stimuli (in dynamic CV syllables), confirming that this is a robust effect that is not limited to highly-controlled artificial stimuli.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Asymmetric discrimination of nonspeech tonal analogues of vowels.

Masapollo

Zhao

Franklin

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Directional asymmetries reveal a universal bias in vowel perception favoring extreme vocalic articulations, which lead to acoustic vowel signals with dynamic formant trajectories and well-defined spectral prominences due to the convergence of adjacent formants. The present experiments investigated whether this bias reflects speech-specific processes or general properties of spectral processing in the auditory system. Toward this end, we examined whether analogous asymmetries in perception arise with non-speech tonal analogues that approximate some of the dynamic and static spectral characteristics of naturally-produced /u/ vowels executed with more versus less extreme lip gestures. We found a qualitatively similar but weaker directional effect with two-component tones varying in both the dynamic changes and proximity of their spectral energies. In subsequent experiments, we pinned down the phenomenon using tones that varied in one or both of these two acoustic characteristics. We found comparable asymmetries with tones that differed exclusively in their spectral dynamics, and no asymmetries with tones that differed exclusively in their spectral proximity or both spectral features. We interpret these findings as evidence that dynamic spectral changes are a critical cue for eliciting asymmetries in non-speech tone perception, but that the potential contribution of general auditory processes to asymmetries in vowel perception is limited.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 1: Replicating Directional Asymmetries Using Non-mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Asymmetric discrimination of nonspeech tonal analogues of vowels.

Masapollo

Zhao

Franklin

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

Self Cite

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Neurocomputational Properties of Speech Sound Perception and Production

Grimaldi

2023

Neuromethods

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Effects of formant proximity and stimulus prototypicality on the neural discrimination of vowels: Evidence from the auditory frequency-following response

et al. 2019

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Cross-language speech perception experiments indicate that for many vowel contrasts, discrimination is easier when the same pair of vowels is presented in one direction compared to the reverse direction. According to one account, these directional asymmetries reflect a universal bias favoring “focal” vowels (i.e., vowels with prominent spectral peaks formed by the convergence of adjacent formants). An alternative account is that such effects reflect an experience-dependent bias favoring prototypical exemplars of native-language vowel categories. Here, we tested the predictions of these accounts by recording the auditory frequency-following response in English-speaking listeners to two synthetic variants of the vowel /u/ that differed in the proximity of their first and second formants and prototypicality, with stimuli arranged in oddball and reversed-oddball blocks. Participants showed evidence of neural discrimination when the more-focal/less-prototypic /u/ served as the deviant stimulus, but not when the less-focal/more-prototypic /u/ served as the deviant, consistent with the focalization account.

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A universal bias in adult vowel perception – By ear or by eye

Cited by 10 publications

References 51 publications

Asymmetric discrimination of nonspeech tonal analogues of vowels.

Asymmetric discrimination of nonspeech tonal analogues of vowels.

Neurocomputational Properties of Speech Sound Perception and Production

Effects of formant proximity and stimulus prototypicality on the neural discrimination of vowels: Evidence from the auditory frequency-following response

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