Effects of Timing Regularity and Metrical Expectancy on Spoken-Word Perception

Abstract

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with highly regular inter-stress timing. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these regular time points. Better timing regularity should improve spoken-word perception. Previous studies have suggested only a weak effect of speech rhythm on spoken-word perception, but the timing of inter-stress intervals was not controlled in these studies. A phoneme monitoring experiment is reported, in which listeners heard lists of disyllabic words in which the timing of the stressed vowels was either regular (with equidistant inter-stress intervals) or irregular. In addition, metrical expectancy was controlled by varying the stress pattern of the target word, as either the same or the opposite of the stress pattern in its preceding words. Resulting reac-tion times show a main effect of timing regularity, but not of metrical expectancy. These results suggest that listeners employ attentional rhythms in spoken-word per-ception, and that regular speech timing improves speech communication.

Attentional entrainment and perceived event duration

“…More broadly, this study adds to a growing body of work showing that attentional entrainment (i) occurs across modalities [9] and (ii) plays an important role in speech and language processing, namely in helping listeners segment continuous speech signal into meaningful units [10][11][12]. With respect to language processing, there is increasing evidence that distal speech rhythm guides listeners' temporal expectations about the perceptual organization of later speech material, influencing how they will segment that material and ultimately what words they hear.…”

Effects of rhythm and phrase-final lengthening on word-spotting in Korean

“…As it turned out, this expectation did not translate into a strong need for consistent rhythm across phrases. This is very different from what is observed in English with respect to foot structure (the closest equivalent to the Korean AP), which is critical both for grammatical word-level phenomena (Hayes, 1995) and for speech processing (Quené & Port, 2005 and references therein; Dilley & McAuley, 2008;Brown et al, 2011;Morrill et al, 2014).…”

Regularity of unit length boosts statistical learning in verbal and nonverbal artificial languages

“…On the basis of the DAT, we predicted that learning artificial languages of regular-length units might benefit from listeners' attentional cycles. In our study, the attentional cues were not based on acoustic changes (like stress in speech; Quené & Port, 2005;Schmidt-Kassow & Kotz, 2009), but emerged during the learning process, as suggested by the onset negativity that has been observed in ERP studies (Alba et al, 2008;Sanders et al, 2009). Over AL exposure, listeners progressively learn the high TPs within units and can anticipate when a unit will end and when a new one will start.…”

“…When listening to an event sequence, external rhythmic cues direct attention periodically and allow listeners to develop temporal expectations about the occurrence of future events, thus facilitating auditory sequencing. Beyond explaining temporal expectancy in music (e.g., Jones & Boltz, 1989), the DAT offers a framework for speech perception: Regular timing between stressed syllables enhances phoneme detection (Quené & Port, 2005) and syntactic processing (Schmidt-Kassow & Kotz, 2009). When applied to ALs with no acoustic cues as to unit boundaries, the DAT-together with the observation that unit onsets benefit from increased attentional resources (Astheimer & Sanders, 2009)-leads us to hypothesize that regular unit onsets guide attention over time and allow for the development of temporal expectations about the next unit onset, thus boosting (and bootstrapping) learning.…”