Perceptual consequences of native and non-native clear speech

Kato, Misaki; Baese‐Berk, Melissa M.

doi:10.1121/10.0009403

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…We acknowledge that we did not measure all possible acoustic modifications, but rather chose “global” measures (F0 mean, F0 range, and speaking rate) as we anticipated that these measures would shift during production of clear speech. However, given the specific properties of our stimuli, we did not measure a variety of other segmental characteristics that have been previously demonstrated to shift from plain to clear speech (e.g., vowel space; Kato & Baese-Berk, 2022; Smiljanić & Bradlow, 2005). Simply put, our stimuli were designed to investigate perceptual benefits of clear and plain speech within HP and LP sentences, but were not designed for more detailed acoustic comparisons.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effects of Acoustic and Semantic Enhancements on Perception of Native and Non-Native Speech

Kato

Baese‐Berk

2023

Lang Speech

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Previous research has shown that native listeners benefit from clearly produced speech, as well as from predictable semantic context when these enhancements are delivered in native speech. However, it is unclear whether native listeners benefit from acoustic and semantic enhancements differently when listening to other varieties of speech, including non-native speech. The current study examines to what extent native English listeners benefit from acoustic and semantic cues present in native and non-native English speech. Native English listeners transcribed sentence final words that were of different levels of semantic predictability, produced in plain- or clear-speaking styles by Native English talkers and by native Mandarin talkers of higher- and lower-proficiency in English. The perception results demonstrated that listeners benefited from semantic cues in higher- and lower-proficiency talkers’ speech (i.e., transcribed speech more accurately), but not from acoustic cues, even though higher-proficiency talkers did make substantial acoustic enhancements from plain to clear speech. The current results suggest that native listeners benefit more robustly from semantic cues than from acoustic cues when those cues are embedded in non-native speech.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we use different SNRs for our native and non-native talkers. This was done to prevent potential ceiling and/or floor effects for some talker groups, and follows precedent from other work (Kato & Baese-Berk, 2022; Rogers et al, 2010). However, this does introduce a potential confound.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Acoustic and Semantic Enhancements on Perception of Native and Non-Native Speech

Kato

Baese‐Berk

2023

Lang Speech

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“…However, not all studies require participants to wear headphones; some do not include a headphone check or instructions to wear headphones (e.g., Denby & Goldrick, 2021;D'Onofrio, 2018;Kato & Baese-Berk, 2022;Vujović, Ramscar, & Wonnacott, 2021;Williams, Panayotov, & Kempe, 2021). It is important to note that the lack of consistent headphone use in these studies does not seem to be an issue in finding meaningful results.…”

Section: Checking For Headphonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do headphone checks impact perception data?

Sanker¹

2023

Laboratory Phonology

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Headphone checks have rapidly become an assumed part of best practices in online perception studies. Do they actually improve our ability to find phonological patterns? This study attempts to replicate several perceptual effects that depend on different aspects of the acoustic signal, testing whether requiring participants to pass two commonly used headphone checks (Huggins pitch perception, Milne et al., 2021; dichotic loudness perception, Woods, Siegel, Traer, & McDermott, 2017) impacts the results or the sample population being used. Participants who pass the Huggins check exhibit a larger effect of spectral tilt on perceived vowel duration, but no other effects were strengthened by either headphone check. Headphone checks actually resulted in a weaker effect of coda voicing on perceived vowel duration. A look at who is excluded by the headphone checks shows that both of them produce exclusions that are imbalanced by participants' age, gender, education, and geographic region. These imbalanced exclusions have the potential to impact experimental results in a range of ways. Thus, while headphone checks are likely to be valuable for some types of experiments, for others they might have unintended effects, and for many studies they are unlikely to have any substantial effect on the results.

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Feedback From Automatic Speech Recognition to Elicit Clear Speech in Healthy Speakers

Gutz,

Maffei,

Green

2023

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

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Purpose: This study assessed the effectiveness of feedback generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR) for eliciting clear speech from young, healthy individuals. As a preliminary step toward exploring a novel method for eliciting clear speech in patients with dysarthria, we investigated the effects of ASR feedback in healthy controls. If successful, ASR feedback has the potential to facilitate independent, at-home clear speech practice. Method: Twenty-three healthy control speakers (ages 23–40 years) read sentences aloud in three speaking modes: Habitual, Clear (over-enunciated), and in response to ASR feedback (ASR). In the ASR condition, we used Mozilla DeepSpeech to transcribe speech samples and provide participants with a value indicating the accuracy of the ASR's transcription. For speakers who achieved sufficiently high ASR accuracy, noise was added to their speech at a participant-specific signal-to-noise ratio to ensure that each participant had to over-enunciate to achieve high ASR accuracy. Results: Compared to habitual speech, speech produced in the ASR and Clear conditions was clearer, as rated by speech-language pathologists, and more intelligible, per speech-language pathologist transcriptions. Speech in the Clear and ASR conditions aligned on several acoustic measures, particularly those associated with increased vowel distinctiveness and decreased speaking rate. However, ASR accuracy, intelligibility, and clarity were each correlated with different speech features, which may have implications for how people change their speech for ASR feedback. Conclusions: ASR successfully elicited outcomes similar to clear speech in healthy speakers. Future work should investigate its efficacy in eliciting clear speech in people with dysarthria.

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Perceptual consequences of native and non-native clear speech

Cited by 6 publications

References 33 publications

The Effects of Acoustic and Semantic Enhancements on Perception of Native and Non-Native Speech

The Effects of Acoustic and Semantic Enhancements on Perception of Native and Non-Native Speech

How do headphone checks impact perception data?

Feedback From Automatic Speech Recognition to Elicit Clear Speech in Healthy Speakers

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