Puzzle-solving science: the quixotic quest for units in speech perception

Goldinger, Stephen D.; Azuma, Tamiko

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(03)00030-5

Cited by 122 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…The suggestion that the manipulations of segmental contrasts do not yield significantly different reaction times seems to be supported by comparable data from Spanish (Černikovská and Čermák, in print). This is in accordance with current models of phonology (Bybee 2001;Wedel 2011) and speech processing (Grossberg 2003;Goldinger and Azuma 2003), which no longer see the role of segments as central in word recognition and mental representations of speech. From another perspective, research findings from the past 15 years (e.g., Derwing and Rossiter 2003;Hahn 2004) provide evidence that it is the prosodic features of speech which impact aspects like intelligibility and comprehensibility much more than segmental contrasts.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Pre-fortis shortening in Czech English: A production and reaction-time study

Skarnitzl

Šturm

2016

RiL

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This study focuses on the production and perception of English words with a fortis vs. lenis obstruent in the syllable coda. The contrast is mostly cued by the duration of the preceding vowel, which is shorter before fortis than before lenis sounds in native speech. In the first experiment we analyzed the production of 10 Czech speakers of English and compared them to two native controls. The results showed that the Czech speakers did not sufficiently exploit duration to cue the identity of the word-final obstruent. In the second experiment we manipulated C and V durations in target words to transplant the native ratios onto the Czech-accented speech, enhancing the fortis–lenis contrast, and vice versa. 108 listeners took part in a word-monitoring task in which reaction times were measured. The hypothesized advantage to items in which the target word (with a fortis or lenis obstruent) was semantically congruent with the following context was not confirmed, and subsequent analyses showed that the words’ frequency of use and the collocations they enter into strongly affect speech processing and correlate to a large degree with the reaction times.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Pre-fortis shortening in Czech English: A production and reaction-time study

Skarnitzl

Šturm

2016

RiL

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“…The present results provide another case where a segmental model should make strong claims for a role of phonetic or phonological segments, but the data fail to support it (43,44). Data and analyses presented here support an informationtheoretic approach to speech perception (24,25).…”

contrasting

confidence: 57%

Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility

Stilp

Kluender²

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

100

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Speech sounds are traditionally divided into consonants and vowels. When only vowels or only consonants are replaced by noise, listeners are more accurate understanding sentences in which consonants are replaced but vowels remain. From such data, vowels have been suggested to be more important for understanding sentences; however, such conclusions are mitigated by the fact that replaced consonant segments were roughly one-third shorter than vowels. We report two experiments that demonstrate listener performance to be better predicted by simple psychoacoustic measures of cochlea-scaled spectral change across time. First, listeners identified sentences in which portions of consonants (C), vowels (V), CV transitions, or VC transitions were replaced by noise. Relative intelligibility was not well accounted for on the basis of Cs, Vs, or their transitions. In a second experiment, distinctions between Cs and Vs were abandoned. Instead, portions of sentences were replaced on the basis of cochlea-scaled spectral entropy (CSE). Sentence segments having relatively high, medium, or low entropy were replaced with noise. Intelligibility decreased linearly as the amount of replaced CSE increased. Duration of signal replaced and proportion of consonants/vowels replaced fail to account for listener data. CSE corresponds closely with the linguistic construct of sonority (or vowel-likeness) that is useful for describing phonological systematicity, especially syllable composition. Results challenge traditional distinctions between consonants and vowels. Speech intelligibility is better predicted by nonlinguistic sensory measures of uncertainty (potential information) than by orthodox physical acoustic measures or linguistic constructs.

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“…Instead listeners may first extract more salient information from the acoustic signal, such as the number of syllables, and use that information to help construct the pool of candidate targets. Indeed, over the years, a number of proposals have been made for the syllable as the primary unit of speech perception (e.g., Goldinger, 2003;Savin and Bever, 1970). More recently, Poeppel (2003) has reported neurolinguistic evidence suggesting that listeners monitor for both phonemes and syllables simultaneously.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Misperceptions of spoken words: Data from a random sample of American English words

Felty

Buchwald

Gruenenfelder

et al. 2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study reports a detailed analysis of incorrect responses from an open-set spoken word recognition experiment of 1428 words designed to be a random sample of the entire American English lexicon. The stimuli were presented in six-talker babble to 192 young, normal-hearing listeners at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, þ5, and þ10 dB). The results revealed several patterns: (1) errors tended to have a higher frequency of occurrence than did the corresponding target word, and frequency of occurrence of error responses was significantly correlated with target frequency of occurrence; (2) incorrect responses were close to the target words in terms of number of phonemes and syllables but had a mean edit distance of 3; (3) for syllables, substitutions were much more frequent than either deletions or additions; for phonemes, deletions were slightly more frequent than substitutions; both were more frequent than additions; and (4) for errors involving just a single segment, substitutions were more frequent than either deletions or additions. The raw data are being made available to other researchers as supplementary material to form the beginnings of a database of speech errors collected under controlled laboratory conditions.

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Puzzle-solving science: the quixotic quest for units in speech perception

Cited by 122 publications

References 75 publications

Pre-fortis shortening in Czech English: A production and reaction-time study

Pre-fortis shortening in Czech English: A production and reaction-time study

Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility

Misperceptions of spoken words: Data from a random sample of American English words

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