Flexible perceptual sensitivity to acoustic and distributional cues

Cohen, Clara; Kang, Shinae

doi:10.1075/ml.16029.coh

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Three of these four random slopes did not remain in the model since the maximal and the other random effects structures (i.e., those with the two intercepts and three, two or one random slope(s)) were not appropriate ('Singular fit' issue) and therefore manually and in a step-by-step manner simplified. It is well known from the literature that complex random effects structures can cause problems (see, e.g., Barr et al 2013;Matuschek et al 2017;Cohen & Kang 2018; Martin Schweinberger p.c. ), hence we opted for the reduced model.…”

Section: Statistical Analysis and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Schlechtweg¹,

Corbett²

2022

English Language and Linguistics

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Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was longer if followed by a past tense verb (e.g. The pods/odds eventually dropped), in comparison to a following present tense verb (e.g. The old screens/jeans obviously need replacing.). Put differently, the s became longer in the absence of overt morphosyntactic agreement, where it was mostly the sole plurality marker in the sentence. The objective of the present article is to examine whether this effect can be replicated in a more controlled setting. Having considered a large number of potential confounding variables in a reading experiment, we found an effect in the expected direction, one that is compatible with the literature on the impact that predictability has on duration. We interpret this finding against the background of the role of fine acoustic detail in language.

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Section: Statistical Analysis and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Schlechtweg¹,

Corbett²

2022

English Language and Linguistics

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“…The first criterion implied that the t statistics of the respective fixed effect had to be lower than −2 or higher than 2. 6 Second, the model with the fixed effect had to have a better fit than the model without it; this would be reflected in a significant difference between the two models, as detected in an ANOVA. Third, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) had to be smaller for the model with, in contrast to the model without, the respective fixed effect (see also Pinheiro and Bates, 2000;Wu, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/

2023

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A person’s first language (L1) affects the way they acquire speech in a second language (L2). However, we know relatively little about the role different varieties of the L1 play in the acquisition of L2 speech. This study focuses on German (L1) learners of English (L2) and asks whether the degree to which German speakers distinguish between the two vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in their L1 has an impact on how well these individuals identify /æ/ and discriminate between the two English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. These two English vowels differ in both vowel quality and duration (/æ/ is longer than /ɛ/). We report on an identification and a discrimination experiment. In the first study, participants heard a sound file and were asked to indicate whether they heard “pen” or “pan” (or “pedal” or “paddle”). The stimuli differed from each other in terms of both vowel quality (11 steps on a spectral continuum from an extreme /æ/ to an extreme /ɛ/) and duration (short, middle, long). In the second study, participants had to signal whether two sound files they were exposed to differed from each other. We modeled the percentage of /æ/ (“pan,” “paddle”) selection (identification task only, binomial logistic regression), accuracy (discrimination task only, binomial logistic regression), and reaction time (identification and discrimination tasks, linear mixed effects models) by implementing the German Pillai score as a measure of vowel overlap in our analysis. Each participant has an individual Pillai score, which ranges from 0 (= merger of L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) to 1 (=maintenance of the contrast between L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) and had been established, prior to the perception experiments reported here, in a production study. Although the findings from the discrimination study remain inconclusive, the results from the identification test support the hypothesis that maintaining the vowel contrast in the L1 German leads to a more native-like identification of /æ/ in L2 English. We conclude that sociolinguistic variation in someone’s L1 can affect L2 acquisition.

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“…One possibility is that simple exposures has accustomed listeners to hearing them, such that listeners recognise speech that conforms to the patterns more quickly than speech which violate those patterns. Yet, as Cohen and Kang (2018) found, not all detectable acoustic patterns in spoken language are useful for identifying words, and so are not always used in speech perception. A second possibility, then, is that listeners learned to draw on these patterns because they are useful in English.…”

Section: Pragmatic Expectationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Just to be safe: Listeners use redundant phonetic information to distinguish unsuffixed from suffixed nouns

Cohen¹,

Carlson²,

Dussias³

2023

Preprint

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Pronunciation variation is systematic, and provides listeners with cues to what the speaker is about to say. Shortened stems, for example, can indicate an upcoming suffix, while lengthened ones can indicate a word boundary follows. Previous work has shown that listeners draw on these cues to distinguish multisyllabic from monosyllabic target words. In this project, we ask whether (i) listeners use these cues to distinguish words that differ only in morphological structure with no change in syllable count; (ii) whether the redundancy of these cues in the immediate sentence affects listener attentiveness; and (iii) whether linguistic experience can change how listeners learn or use these cues. In two visual-world eye-tracking studies, in English and Spanish, we presented listeners with utterances containing target nouns whose stem durations were manipulated to provide cues to the presence or absence of a plural suffix. The redundancy of these cues was manipulated across different sentence contexts: Sentences in which agreeing determiners indicated noun number rendered the stem duration cues redundant, while sentences with no determiners rendered the cues more informative. In both experiments, listeners attended to acoustic cues signalling an upcoming suffix even when the sentence context rendered such cues redundant. Further, in Experiment 2 high-proficiency Spanish-English bilinguals were more sensitive to such cues than low-proficiency bilinguals, suggesting a phonetic bilingual advantage in speech perception. These results are consistent with ideal observer models in which listeners are attentive to all acoustic detail, regardless of whether it is informative or redundant.

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Flexible perceptual sensitivity to acoustic and distributional cues

Cited by 8 publications

References 47 publications

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? Thesduration of English regular plural nouns

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/

Just to be safe: Listeners use redundant phonetic information to distinguish unsuffixed from suffixed nouns

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