Interactions between distal speech rate, linguistic knowledge, and speech environment

Abstract

During lexical access, listeners use both signalbased and knowledge-based cues, and information from the linguistic context can affect the perception of acoustic speech information. Recent findings suggest that the various cues used in lexical access are implemented with flexibility and may be affected by information from the larger speech context. We conducted 2 experiments to examine effects of a signal-based cue (distal speech rate) and a knowledge-based cue (linguistic structure) on lexical perception. In Experiment 1, we manipulated distal speech rate in utterances where an acoustically ambiguous critical word was either obligatory for the utterance to be syntactically well formed (e.g., Conner knew that bread and butter (are) both in the pantry) or optional (e.g., Don must see the harbor (or) boats). In Experiment 2, we examined identical target utterances as in Experiment 1 but changed the distribution of linguistic structures in the fillers. The results of the 2 experiments demonstrate that speech rate and linguistic knowledge about critical word obligatoriness can both influence speech perception. In addition, it is possible to alter the strength of a signal-based cue by changing information in the speech environment. These results provide support for models of word segmentation that include flexible weighting of signal-based and knowledge-based cues.

Contextual speech rate influences morphosyntactic prediction and integration

“…These observations are in line with previous behavioural studies (Heffner, Newman, Dilley, & Idsardi, 2015;Morrill, Baese-Berk, Heffner, & Dilley, 2015), where rate effects also persisted even in the presence of constraining higher-level linguistic information. Crucially, using the visual-world paradigm allowed us to measure responses to the rate manipulation without asking for explicit categorisation of ein vs. eine, so in contrast to previous studies, no task-driven attention was drawn to the ambiguous sounds.…”

Not just a function of function words: Distal speech rate influences perception of prosodically weak syllables

“…Subsequent studies of this Bdisappearing word effectd emonstrated that distal speech rate interacts with a number of factors during spoken word recognition, including intensity, frequency, and word duration (Heffner et al, 2013), speech rhythm , linguistic knowledge (Morrill, Baese-Berk, Heffner, & Dilley, 2015), global speech rate (Baese-Berk et al, 2014), and speech signal intelligibility . Of particular interest, Heffner et al (2013) manipulated acoustic cues that affected the clarity of amplitude envelope cues to the presence of a word.…”

“…The meaning of a sentence may in many cases be clear to the listener with or without a function word. Morrill et al (2015) examined function 1 It should be noted that there are many cues to word segmentation other than the amplitude envelope (e.g., F0, intensity, and word duration, among others). These cues clearly interact with distal speech rate (see Heffner et al, 2013); however, the focus of the present study is unclear amplitude envelope cues and the use of distal speech rate to resolve ambiguities resulting from these unclear cues.…”

“…Because speech does not generally contain clear acoustic cues to word boundaries, the issue of how a listener segments the stream into individual words has been a long-standing topic of interest. Listeners have been shown to use a multitude of different types of cues to cope with this challenge, including fine phonetic detail (Clayards, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Jacobs, 2008;McMurray, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002), phonotactic information (McQueen, 1998;Vitevitch & Luce 1999), suprasegmental cues, e.g., timing (Beach, 1991;Cutler & Norris, 1988), and syntactic and semantic predictability (Mattys, Melhorn, & White, 2007;Morrill, Baese-Berk, Heffner, & Dilley, 2015;Staub & Clifton, 2006). These cues, ranging from very finegrained and acoustic to broader and more knowledge-based, are integrated to interpret the signal in a relatively seamless way.…”

Revisiting Neil Armstrongs Moon-Landing Quote: Implications for Speech Perception, Function Word Reduction, and Acoustic Ambiguity

“…Context speech rate is particularly important when listeners cannot rely on linguistic knowledge [16,27]. Durational information is so important in ambiguous spectral contexts that changes in relative timing information can cause a word in a speech signal to completely disappear perceptually.…”