Cross-language specialization in phonetic processing: English and Hindi perception of /w/-/v/ speech and nonspeech

Iverson, Paul; Wagner, Anita; Pinet, Melanie; Rosen, Stuart

doi:10.1121/1.3632048

Cited by 5 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…Santoro et al, 2014). Indeed, it may prove misguided to assume a privileged status for speech, or for there to be a categorical distinction between speech and other sounds (Iverson et al, 2011;Iverson et al, 2016;Rosen & Iverson, 2007).…”

Section: (B) Cortical (A)symmetries: Is Speech Comprehension Left-dommentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

Evans

McGettigan

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Functional neuroimaging revolutionized the study of human language in the late 20 th Century, allowing researchers to investigate its underlying cognitive processes in the intact brain. Here, we review how functional MRI (fMRI) in particular has contributed to our understanding of speech comprehension, with a focus on studies of intelligibility. We highlight the use of carefully controlled acoustic stimuli to reveal the underlying hierarchical organization of speech processing systems and cortical (a)symmetries, and discuss the contributions of novel design and analysis techniques to the contextualization of perisylvian regions within wider speech processing networks. Within this, we outline the methodological challenges of fMRI as a technique for investigating speech and describe the innovations that have overcome or mitigated these difficulties. Focussing on multivariate approaches to fMRI, we highlight how these techniques have allowed both local neural representations and broader scale brain systems to be described. 3 General IntroductionThe emergence of functional neuroimaging in the 1990s offered the unprecedented opportunity to examine the processing of spoken language in the intact, functioning human brain with a spatial resolution on the order of millimetres. Building upon the highly influential neuropsychological literature of the late 19 th and 20 th Centuries, a key aim of empirical study was uncovering the neural substrates for the comprehension of speech. Here, we offer a review and synthesis of the contributions of functional imaging -in particular, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) -to our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of speech comprehension. We also offer an evaluation of the method and ask whether fMRI will continue to contribute substantially to our knowledge, or whether other modalities (or combinations of techniques) hold more promise for the future of the field.Other authors have offered excellent overviews of the state of the art in the functional imaging of language processes more generally (e.g. Price, 2012), and in the specific methodological challenges of examining auditory processing with fMRI (Peelle 2014). For this review, we felt that it was timely to limit our discussion to the use of fMRI in the investigation of speech comprehension. The study of speech comprehension has been at the centre of significant theoretical debate in the last decade, for example in addressing the role of hemispheric asymmetries and motor contributions to speech perception. Advances in experimental design and data analysis have played an important role in refining our understanding of these issues.Here, we highlight in particular the contributions and future opportunities afforded by multivariate analyses of the BOLD response in examining the nature and content of neural representations of the speech signal. Approaches such as Representational Similarity Analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008), provide promise for integrating multiple imaging modalities, allowing examinatio...

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Section: (B) Cortical (A)symmetries: Is Speech Comprehension Left-dommentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

Evans

McGettigan

2017

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…for stimuli that had spectral-temporal variation that was different enough from normal speech (Experiment 2). That being said, Experiment 2 adds to our previous examples (Iverson et al, 2011) of stimuli that are difficult to categorize phonemically, and sometimes not even sound like speech, but are affected by language experience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…This approach of exploring the territory between speech and non-speech was used by Iverson et al (2011) to examine the perception of English /w/-/v/ by English and Hindi speakers. We used a set of English /w/-/v/ continua that acoustically deconstructed the stimuli so that they varied in the degree that they sounded like speech or non-speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of language experience on pre-categorical perception: Distinguishing general from specialized processes in speech perception

Iverson

Wagner

Rosen

2016

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Cross-language differences in speech perception have traditionally been linked to phonological categories, but it has become increasingly clear that language experience has effects beginning at early stages of perception, which blurs the accepted distinctions between general and speech-specific processing. The present experiments explored this distinction by playing stimuli to English and Japanese speakers that manipulated the acoustic form of English /r/ and /l/, in order to determine how acoustically natural and phonologically identifiable a stimulus must be for cross-language discrimination differences to emerge. Discrimination differences were found for stimuli that did not sound subjectively like speech or /r/ and /l/, but overall they were strongly linked to phonological categorization. The results thus support the view that phonological categories are an important source of cross-language differences, but also show that these differences can extend to stimuli that do not clearly sound like speech.

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“…Hindi, however, does not contrast these speech sounds. It is unclear to what extent Hindi speakers of Indian English produce or perceive speech categories that resemble /v/ or /w/ found in English varieties spoken by speakers of American or British English Iverson, Wagner, Pinet, & Rosen, 2011). The lack of contrast between /v/ and /w/ in Hindi is reflected in Hindi orthography, in which the grapheme "व" represents a single Hindi speech sound /ʋ/, which is the closest match to English /v/ or /w/ (Ohala, 1999;Pierrehumbert & Nair, 1996;Sahgal & Agnihotri, 1988;Whitney, 1896).…”

Section: Status Of /V/ and /W/ In English Versus Hindimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because Hindi speakers produce this labiodental approximant /ʋ/ in Hindi, it is important to explore how they perceive English /v/ and /w/. Previous studies showed that Hindi speakers assimilated English /v/ and /w/ to the single Hindi labiodental approximant /ʋ/ (Iverson, Ekanayake, Hamann, Sennema, & Evans, 2008;Iverson et al, 2011). In line with the previous findings, our pilot data with eight Hindi speakers also showed that Hindi speakers assimilated 100 % of English /v/ and /w/ tokens to the single labiodental approximant /ʋ/ in Hindi.…”

Section: Status Of /V/ and /W/ In English Versus Hindimentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of American English consonants /v/ and /w/ by Hindi speakers of English

Grover

Shafer

Campanelli

et al. 2021

JSLP

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This study examined perception of the American English (AE) /v/-/w/ consonant contrast by Hindi speakers of English as a second language (L2). A second aim was to determine whether residence in the US modulated perception of this difficult contrast for proficient bilingual Hindi-English listeners. Two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals (the first resided in the US for more than five years, the second lived in India) and a group of AE-speaking listeners participated in the study. Listeners’ identification and discrimination of nonsense words (e.g., “vagag” vs. “wagag”) were examined. Hindi listeners performed significantly less accurately than AE controls. Accuracy by Hindi listeners was near chance for identification and higher-than-chance for discrimination. Exposure to AE in the US did not improve performance. These results are consistent with previous studies of late L2 learners and extend findings to a population that was proficient in an L2 before arriving in the L2 environment.

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Cross-language specialization in phonetic processing: English and Hindi perception of /w/-/v/ speech and nonspeech

Cited by 5 publications

References 24 publications

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

Comprehending auditory speech: previous and potential contributions of functional MRI

Effects of language experience on pre-categorical perception: Distinguishing general from specialized processes in speech perception

Perception of American English consonants /v/ and /w/ by Hindi speakers of English

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