Native Listeners’ Use of Information in Parsing Ambiguous Casual Speech

Abstract

In conversational speech, phones and entire syllables are often missing. This can make “he’s” and “he was” homophonous, realized for example as [ɨz]. Similarly, “you’re” and “you were” can both be realized as [jɚ], [ɨ], etc. We investigated what types of information native listeners use to perceive such verb tenses. Possible types included acoustic cues in the phrase (e.g., in “he was”), the rate of the surrounding speech, and syntactic and semantic information in the utterance, such as the presence of time adverbs such as “yesterday” or other tensed verbs. We extracted utterances such as “So they’re gonna have like a random roommate” and “And he was like, ‘What’s wrong?!’” from recordings of spontaneous conversations. We presented parts of these utterances to listeners, in either a written or auditory modality, to determine which types of information facilitated listeners’ comprehension. Listeners rely primarily on acoustic cues in or near the target words rather than meaning and syntactic information in the context. While that information also improves comprehension in some conditions, the acoustic cues in the target itself are strong enough to reverse the percept that listeners gain from all other information together. Acoustic cues override other information in comprehending reduced productions in conversational speech.

Testing for canonical form orientation in speech tempo perception

“…If an exemplar is both relatable to a given canonical form (by virtue of its phonetic detail) and deviant from it, it can offer rich predictive information both about word identity and about the larger structure of which a word is part, including aspects of utterance rate and rhythmic structure which can inform subsequent perceptual decisions about segmental identity, location of word boundaries, and so on. On this view, the canonical form is not so much the obligatory target of lexical access, as a valuable reference point around which listeners can parse both the linguistic structure and socio-indexical properties of an utterance: see Warner et al (2022) for a similar view. We would predict that the tempo information that can be accessed from naturally occurring reduced forms should be more robust than that obtained from manipulated forms such as those in our experiment.…”

“…Phonetic reduction phenomena, including phone and syllable deletion, are ubiquitous in normal speech (Bürki, 2018;Ernestus, 2014;Johnson, 2004;Warner et al, 2022).…”

“…Phonetic reduction phenomena, including phone and syllable deletion, are ubiquitous in normal speech ( Bürki, 2018 ; Ernestus, 2014 ; Johnson, 2004 ; Warner et al, 2022 ). While “[t]he comprehension of reduced speech is a complex process of which we have just started to discover the general mechanisms” ( Ernestus, 2014 , p. 36), there is considerable evidence to support the notion that full pronunciation forms—“canonical forms”—have a different status from reduced forms in speech perception.…”