Maintaining information about speech input during accent adaptation

Burchill, Zachary; Liu, Linda; Jaeger, T. Florian

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0199358

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…In previous perception experiments conducted on the web (Burchill, Liu, & Jaeger, submitted; Liu, Xie, Weatherholtz, & Jaeger, in prep), we found that participants who reported to be wearing headphones tended to show better task performance. We thus asked participants to wear headphones, and excluded participants who reported otherwise.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Inferring causes during speech perception

Liu

Jaeger

2018

Cognition

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One of the central challenges in speech perception is the lack of invariance: talkers differ in how they map words onto the speech signal. Previous work has shown that one mechanism by which listeners overcome this variability is adaptation. However, talkers differ in how they pronounce words for a number of reasons, ranging from more permanent, characteristic factors such as having a foreign accent, to more temporary, incidental factors, such as speaking with a pen in the mouth. One challenge for listeners is that the true cause underlying atypical pronunciations is never directly known, and instead must be inferred from (often causally ambiguous) evidence. In three experiments, we investigate whether these inferences underlie speech perception, and how the speech perception system deals with uncertainty about competing causes for atypical pronunciations. We find that adaptation to atypical pronunciations is affected by whether the atypical pronunciations are seen as characteristic or incidental. Furthermore, we find that listeners are able to maintain information about previous causally ambiguous pronunciations that they experience, and use this previously experienced evidence to drive their adaptation after additional evidence has disambiguated the cause. Our findings revise previous proposals that causally ambiguous evidence is ignored during speech adaptation.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Inferring causes during speech perception

Liu

Jaeger

2018

Cognition

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“…This was particularly helpful for the present studies, which include a total of 960 participants. We have used similar web-based paradigms in previous work on speech perception (e.g., Bicknell, Bushong, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2019; Burchill, Liu, & Jaeger, 2018; Bushong & Jaeger, 2017; Kleinschmidt, Raizada, & Jaeger, 2015; Xie et al, 2018), including lexically guided perceptual recalibration to /s/ and /∫/ (Liu & Jaeger, 2018).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talker-specific pronunciation or speech error? Discounting (or not) atypical pronunciations during speech perception.

Liu¹,

Jaeger²

2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Perceptual recalibration allows listeners to adapt to talker-specific pronunciations, such as atypical realizations of specific sounds. Such recalibration can facilitate robust speech recognition. However, indiscriminate recalibration following any atypically pronounced words also risks interpreting pronunciations as characteristic of a talker that are in reality because of incidental, short-lived factors (such as a speech error). We investigate whether the mechanisms underlying perceptual recalibration involve inferences about the causes for unexpected pronunciations. In 5 experiments, we ask whether perceptual recalibration is blocked if the atypical pronunciations of an unfamiliar talker can also be attributed to other incidental causes. We investigated 3 type of incidental causes for atypical pronunciations: the talker is intoxicated, the talker speaks unusually fast, or the atypical pronunciations occur only in the context of tongue twisters. In all 5 experiments, we find robust evidence for perceptual recalibration, but little evidence that the presence of incidental causes block perceptual recalibration. We discuss these results in light of other recent findings that incidental causes can block perceptual recalibration.

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“…Similarly, while acoustic maintenance may appear to be supported by findings that unsupervised exposure or time-delayed subtitles may attenuate the processing difficulties associated with unfamiliar accents (e.g. Bradlow & Bent, 2008;Burchill et al, 2018), such adaptation can also be accomplished under AOC through listeners' use of contextual information to predict upcoming words and evaluate/adjust to the bottom-up mapping accordingly. Such a top-down mechanism finds support in recent electrophysiological evidence IMMEDIACY OF LINGUISTIC COMPUTATION 32 (Getz & Toscano, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Now you hear me, later you don’t: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech

Caplan¹,

Hafri²,

Trueswell³

2020

Preprint

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(Accepted and In Press at Psychological Science)What happens to the acoustic signal after it enters the mind of a listener? Previous work demonstrates that listeners maintain intermediate representations over time. However, the internal structure of such representations—be they the acoustic-phonetic signal or more general information about the probability of possible categories—remains underspecified. We present two experiments using a novel speaker adaptation paradigm aimed at uncovering the format of speech representations. We exposed adult listeners (N=297) to a speaker whose utterances contained acoustically ambiguous information concerning phones/words and manipulated the temporal availability of disambiguating cues via visually presented text (i.e., presentation before or after each utterance). Results from a traditional phoneme categorization task showed that listeners adapt to a modified acoustic distribution when disambiguating text is provided before the audio, but not after. Results support the position that speech representations consist of activation over categories and are inconsistent with direct maintenance of the acoustic-phonetic signal.

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Maintaining information about speech input during accent adaptation

Cited by 20 publications

References 52 publications

Inferring causes during speech perception

Inferring causes during speech perception

Talker-specific pronunciation or speech error? Discounting (or not) atypical pronunciations during speech perception.

Now you hear me, later you don’t: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech

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