Analysis and analogy in the perception of vowels

Remez, Robert E.; Fellowes, Jennifer M.; Blumenthal, Eva Y.; Nagel, Dalia Shoretz

doi:10.3758/bf03196133

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…A striking finding by Remez, and colleagues (Remez, Fellowes, Blumenthal, & Nagel, 2003) reinforces the finding that “meaningless” language forms evoke meaning in listeners. They presented their participants with analogies to solve.…”

Section: 0 the Sound-meaning “Rift”: Language As A Semi-formal Systemsupporting

confidence: 54%

Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

Fowler

2014

New Ideas in Psychology

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I discuss language forms as the primary means that language communities provide to enable public language use. As such, they are adapted to public use most notably in being linguistically significant vocal tract actions, not the categories in the mind as proposed in phonological theories. Their primary function is to serve as vehicles for production of syntactically structured sequences of words. However, more than that, phonological actions themselves do work in public language use. In particular, they foster interpersonal coordination in social activities. An intriguing property of language forms that likely reflects their emergence in social communicative activities is that phonological forms that should be meaningless (in order to serve their role in the openness of language at the level of the lexicon) are not wholly meaningless. In fact, the form-meaning “rift” is bridged bidirectionally: The smallest language forms are meaningful, and the meanings of lexical language forms generally inhere, in part, in their embodiment by understanders.

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Section: 0 the Sound-meaning “Rift”: Language As A Semi-formal Systemsupporting

confidence: 54%

Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

Fowler

2014

New Ideas in Psychology

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“…The first step toward recognizing that speech dissociates sound and 9 In their typical function, phonetic units have no meaning. However, contrasting sounds may pair systematically with lexical and/or physical contrasts in meaning (Nygaard, 2010;Remez, Fellowes, Blumenthal, & Nagel, 2003). For example, people are slightly better than chance in identifying which of two antonyms in languages they do not know carries which meaning (Brown & Nuttall, 1959;Kunihira, 1971;Nygaard, 2010).…”

Section: Segments In Language As Known (In "Competence" 8 )mentioning

confidence: 99%

"Perception of the speech code" revisited: Speech is alphabetic after all.

Fowler¹,

Shankweiler²,

Studdert‐Kennedy³

2016

Psychological Review

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We revisit an article, "Perception of the Speech Code" (PSC), published in this journal 50 years ago (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) and address one of its legacies concerning the status of phonetic segments, which persists in theories of speech today. In the perspective of PSC, segments both exist (in language as known) and do not exist (in articulation or the acoustic speech signal). Findings interpreted as showing that speech is not a sound alphabet, but, rather, phonemes are encoded in the signal, coupled with findings that listeners perceive articulation, led to the motor theory of speech perception, a highly controversial legacy of PSC. However, a second legacy, the paradoxical perspective on segments has been mostly unquestioned. We remove the paradox by offering an alternative supported by converging evidence that segments exist in language both as known and as used. We support the existence of segments in both language knowledge and in production by showing that phonetic segments are articulatory and dynamic and that coarticulation does not eliminate them. We show that segments leave an acoustic signature that listeners can track. This suggests that speech is well-adapted to public communication in facilitating, not creating a barrier to, exchange of language forms.

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“…Some researchers have suggested that correspondences between vowels and visual shapes dominate the bouba–kiki effect ( Maurer et al, 2006 ; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001 ; Tarte, 1974 , 1982 ). For example, an extensive body of literature suggests that some vowels such as /a/, /o/, and /u/ are round-sounding, whereas other vowels, such as /e/, and /i/ are sharp-sounding ( Kovic et al, 2010 ; Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015 ; Maurer et al, 2006 ; Remez et al, 2003 ). However, others suggest that consonants play a more dominant role over vowels ( Fort et al, 2015 ; Nielsen & Rendall, 2011 ; Ozturk et al, 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing Sounds: The Role of Vowels and Consonants in Crossmodal Correspondences

2022

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Crossmodal correspondences refer to the fact that certain domains of features in different sensory modalities are associated with each other. Here, we investigated the crossmodal correspondences between speech sounds and visual shapes. Specifically, we tested whether the classification dimensions of English vowels (front–central–back) and consonants (voiced–voiceless, sonorant–obstruent, and stop–continuant) correspond to visual shapes along a bipolar rounded–angular dimension. We adapted eighteen meaningless pseudowords from a previous study that corresponded to either the round or the sharp concept. On each trial, the participants heard one of the pseudowords and saw a rounded shape and an angular shape presented side-by-side on the monitor. Participants judged which shape provided a better match to the spoken pseudoword. A logistic regression was conducted in order to elucidate the effectiveness of classification dimensions of phonemes when predicting variations in the sound–shape matchings. The results demonstrated that the sound–shape matchings were predictable using front–central–back dimensions of vowels, and voiced–voiceless and stop–continuant dimensions of consonants. Hence, we verified that sound–shape matching is underpinned by contrasting dimensions in both vowels and consonants, therefore demonstrating crossmodal correspondences at the phonetic level.

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Analysis and analogy in the perception of vowels

Cited by 7 publications

References 23 publications

Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

Talking as doing: Language forms and public language

"Perception of the speech code" revisited: Speech is alphabetic after all.

Seeing Sounds: The Role of Vowels and Consonants in Crossmodal Correspondences

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