How we hear what is hardly there: Mechanisms underlying compensation for /t/-reduction in speech comprehension

Mitterer, Holger; Yoneyama, Kiyoko; Ernestus, Mirjam

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2008.02.004

Cited by 18 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…A first step towards modelling the role of near phonetic context for spoken-word recognition was made in papers on place assimilation and deletion of segments (e.g., Gaskell, 2003;Gaskell & Snoeren, 2008;Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996, 1998Mitterer, Yoneyama, & Ernestus, 2008). Hawkins and Smith (2001), in their POLYSP model (for 'polysystemic speech understanding'), focus on the role of systematic fine phonetic detail that may be spread throughout the speech signal and how it facilitates analysis at all linguistic levels simultaneously.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The roles of bottom-up and top-down information in the recognition of reduced speech: Evidence from listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Janse

Ernestus

2011

Journal of Phonetics

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a b s t r a c tHighly reduced pronunciation variants, such as something like 'yeshay' for yesterday, are abundant in conversational speech. Previous research has shown that listeners understand such pronunciation variants only in their sentential contexts. This study further investigates the roles of the acoustic properties of reduced words themselves and of semantic/syntactic and acoustic information in their contexts. We report five experiments in which participants were tested on the recognition of reduced words originating from a corpus of conversational Dutch. Experiment 1, a visual cloze test, demonstrates that our set of reduced words cannot be guessed just on the basis of their semantic/syntactic context. Experiment 2 replicates the earlier finding that reduced words can only be recognised in their contexts. Experiment 3 shows that the reduced words were less well recognised if the context is presented visually in the form of orthographic transcriptions. These experiments suggest that listeners need some acoustic properties of reduced words themselves, together with semantic/syntactic and acoustic information in their contexts, to recognise reduced words. Experiments 4 and 5 confirm the importance of acoustic information for word recognition by showing that high-frequency hearing loss hinders both the interpretation of the target words' acoustic properties, and the use of neighbouring context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The roles of bottom-up and top-down information in the recognition of reduced speech: Evidence from listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Janse

Ernestus

2011

Journal of Phonetics

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“…3. Mitterer, Yoneyama, & Ernestus, 2008), it is natural to wonder about the ecological validity of these results. The goal of Simulation 3 is to address this question by testing DiBS on a corpus of spontaneous adult speech containing natural pronunciation variation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Diphone‐Based Segmentation

Daland

Pierrehumbert²

2010

Cognitive Science

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This paper reconsiders the diphone-based word segmentation model of Cairns, Shillcock, Chater, and Levy (1997) and Hockema (2006), previously thought to be unlearnable. A statistically principled learning model is developed using Bayes' theorem and reasonable assumptions about infants' implicit knowledge. The ability to recover phrase-medial word boundaries is tested using phonetic corpora derived from spontaneous interactions with children and adults. The (unsupervised and semisupervised) learning models are shown to exhibit several crucial properties. First, only a small amount of language exposure is required to achieve the model's ceiling performance, equivalent to between 1 day and 1 month of caregiver input. Second, the models are robust to variation, both in the free parameter and the input representation. Finally, both the learning and baseline models exhibit undersegmentation, argued to have significant ramifications for speech processing as a whole.

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“…As suggested by previous results regarding compensatory effects in deletions (Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006;Mitterer et al, 2008;, a crucial factor of interest was the duration of preceding /s/. Next, due to the sequence of productions, the following context was restricted to the first segments /v/, /e /, and /s/ of the respective pronouns (see Material section).…”

Section: Factors Of Interestmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite segment deletions in general and /t/ deletions in particular, listeners usually understand what speakers say and are assumed to compensate for imperfect realizations (Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006;Mitterer et al, 2008;. While this would suggest a rule-based (undoing) mechanism for /t/-deletion in natural speech, it is not completely regular in a traditional, rule-based phonological sense, because it does not occur in 100% of the cases (contrary to, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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When BEAT becomes HOUSE: Factors of word final /t/-deletion in German

Zimmerer

Scharinger

Reetz

2011

Speech Communication

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Please cite this article as: Zimmerer, F., Scharinger, M., Reetz, H., When BEAT becomes HOUSE: Factors of word final /t/-deletion in German, Speech Communication (2011Communication ( ), doi: 10.1016Communication ( /j.specom.2011 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.-1 - When BEAT becomes HOUSE: Factors of word final /t/-deletion in German AbstractThe deletion and reduction of alveolar /t/ is a phenomenon that has been given considerable attention in the research on speech production and perception. Data have mainly be drawn from spoken language corpora, where a tight control over contributing factors of /t/-deletion is hardly possible. Here, we present a new way of creating a spoken language corpus adhering to some crucial factors we wanted to hold constant for the investigation of word-final /t/-deletion in German. German is especially interesting with regard to /t/ deletion due to its rich suffixal morphology, attributing morphological status to word-final /t/ in many paradigms. We focused on verb inflection and employed a verb form production task for creating a concise corpus of naturally spoken language in which we could control for factors previously established to affect /t/-deletion. We then determined the best estimators for /t/-productions (i.e. canonical, deleted, or reduced) in our corpus. The influence of extra-linguistic factors was comparable to previous studies. We suggest that our method of constructing a natural language corpus with carefully selected characteristics is a viable way for the examination of deletions and reductions during speech production. Furthermore, we found that the best predictor for non-canonical productions and deletions was the following phonological context.

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How we hear what is hardly there: Mechanisms underlying compensation for /t/-reduction in speech comprehension

Cited by 18 publications

References 51 publications

The roles of bottom-up and top-down information in the recognition of reduced speech: Evidence from listeners with normal and impaired hearing

The roles of bottom-up and top-down information in the recognition of reduced speech: Evidence from listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Learning Diphone‐Based Segmentation

When BEAT becomes HOUSE: Factors of word final /t/-deletion in German

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