Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress

Hay, Jennifer; Warren, Paul; Drager, Katie

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2005.10.001

Cited by 369 publications

(355 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The results reported above from the studies of near and square conducted by Hay et al (2006b) and by Warren et al (2007) are part of a growing body of research that shows that social characteristics associated with speakers can affect the interpretation of phonetic information. In some of the early perceptual work in this area, Strand and Johnson (1996) found that participants' categorization of fricatives on a [ʃ]-[s] continuum was influenced by the putative sex of the speaker as indicated by video clips with which the audio signals were aligned.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…This was demonstrated in a study employing four voices (two of each sex) that were independently rated for probable speaker age. In another study Hay et al (2006b) manipulated age through photographs and showed that perceived age of the speaker influenced identification accuracy of near and square word pairs. The photographs were presented as though they were pictures of the speakers being listened to, and accuracy was greatest after photographs of older individuals, even though the same male and female speech tokens were presented after each of the male and female photographs respectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

Warren

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Production data have shown that one of the features distinguishing uptalk rises from question rises in New Zealand English (NZE) is the alignment point of the rise start, which is earlier in question utterances realized by younger speakers. Previous research has indicated that listeners are sensitive to this distinction in making a forced-choice decision as to whether an utterance is a statement or a question. NZE is also characterized by an ongoing merger of the near and square diphthongs, with younger speakers more likely to realize the vowel in a word such as care with a closer starting point (as in [iɘ], overlapping with their realization of the near vowel), whereas older speakers would have more open starting point (as in [eɘ]). The current study uses the mouse-tracking paradigm to provide evidence that the realization of square with an innovative vs. a conservative variant in a word early in an utterance affects NZE listeners' sensitivity firstly to a rise as a potential signal of an uptalked statement and secondly to the early alignment of the rise as a signal of a question. This finding indicates that the interpretation of prosodic variability can depend on speaker characteristics imputed from other sociophonetic cues.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

Warren

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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“…Monophthongal stimuli were words taken from the lexical sets KIT, DRESS, TRAP, BARN, STRUT, and THOUGHT. In addition to the target monophthongs, participants were also presented with diphthongs involved in the NEAR/SQUARE merger in New Zealand English (Hay, Warren, & Drager 2006). Only (2009) the results from the monophthongs are presented in this paper.…”

Section: Speech Production Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English

2010

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Recent research has been concerned with whether speech accommodation is an automatic process or determined by social factors (e.g. Trudgill 2008). This paper investigates phonetic accommodation in New Zealand English when speakers of NZE are responding to an Australian talker in a speech production task. NZ participants were randomly assigned to either a Positive or Negative group, where they were either flattered or insulted by the Australian. Overall, the NZE speakers accommodated to the speech of the AuE speaker. The flattery/insult manipulation did not influence degree of accommodation, but accommodation was predicted by participants' scores on an Implicit Association Task that measured Australia and New Zealand biases. Participants who scored with a pro-Australia bias were more likely to accommodate to the speech of the AuE speaker. Social biases about how a participant feels about a speaker predicted the extent of accommodation. These biases are, crucially, simultaneously automatic and social. (Speech accommodation, phonetic convergence, New Zealand English, dialect contact)*

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“…Some effects are to a greater or lesser degree indirect. Thus the rate of speech implied by just a single long or short vowel can influence decisions about the identity of an immediately preceding consonant (Miller and Liberman, 1979), a photograph of a person can suffice to cue the relevant talker characteristics (Hay, Warren and Drager, 2006), and exposure to a dialect label can bias the recall of the nature of a vowel sound (Hay, Nolan and Drager, 2006). Combined use of very different information sources -acoustics of the signal, stored knowledge in the lexicon or general knowledge in memory, abstract labels and prior episodes of cognitive or sensory processing -in an integrated fashion is however no problem for a system such as that proposed by the Merge model.…”

Section: Categorical Decision-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstraction-based Efficiency in the Lexicon

Cutler

2010

Laboratory Phonology

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Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress

Cited by 369 publications

References 15 publications

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English

Abstraction-based Efficiency in the Lexicon

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