Representation of speech variability

Abstract

Speech signals provide both linguistic information (e.g., words and sentences) as well as information about the speaker who produced the message (i.e., social-indexical information). Listeners store highly detailed representations of these speech signals, which are simultaneously indexed with linguistic and social category membership. A variety of methodologies-forced-choice categorization, rating, and free classification-have shed light on listeners' cognitive-perceptual representations of the social-indexical information present in the speech signal. Specifically, listeners can accurately identify some talker characteristics, including native language status, approximate age, sex, and gender. Additionally, listeners have sensitivity to other speaker characteristics-such as sexual orientation, regional dialect, native language for non-native speakers, race, and ethnicity-but listeners tend to be less accurate or more variable at categorizing or rating speakers based on these constructs. However, studies have not necessarily incorporated more recent conceptions of these constructs (e.g., separating listeners' perceptions of race vs ethnicity) or speakers who do not fit squarely into specific categories (e.g., for sex perception, intersex individuals; for gender perception, genderqueer speakers; for race perception, multiracial speakers). Additional research on how the intersections of social-indexical categories influence speech perception is also needed. As the field moves forward, scholars from a variety of disciplines should be incorporated into investigations of how listeners' extract and represent facets of personal identity from speech. Further, the impact of these representations on our interactions with one another in contexts outside of the laboratory should continue to be explored. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1434. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1434 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.

Selecting among competing models of talker adaptation: Attention, cognition, and memory in speech processing efficiency

“…It is interesting to consider whether additional variability in phonetic-phonemic mapping, such as that from different regional, social, or foreign-language accents, would incur additional processing costs, and whether these, too, would be independent of the number of possible interpretations of the acoustic signal. Indeed, knowing how the processes that support talker adaptation as listeners encounter each new talker (e.g., Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007;Choi & Perrachione, 2019) are related to the processes that support talker adaptation when the phonetic-phonemic mappings are unfamiliar to listeners (e.g., Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003;Xie, Theodore, & Myers, 2017) remains a "missing link" in the literature on processing and representing variability in speech (Bent & Holt, 2017).…”

American or British? L2 speakers’ recognition and evaluations of accent features in English

“…This kind of variety recognition involves the cognitive mapping of linguistic features on to records of the usage norms of certain speech communities (Garrett et al 2003). During the mapping process, listener-judges draw upon cognitive-perceptual representations of speech varieties containing social-indexical information (Bent and Holt 2017) to complete the recognition task (McKenzie 2008). Segmental accent features (e.g., rhoticity) form part of these representations and play a key role in the identification process (McKenzie 2015).…”

EFL Learners’ Attitude toward Two Major English Varieties: From Perplexity to Prejudice

“…When the First World War was over, AE continued itself to establish its own character, including how to state expressions, vocabulary (including being racy), diction and even more pronunciation. Even it was being underestimated because of being the second-class English, AE turns out to have same status and values with BE (Han, 2019;Bent and Holt 2017). The main point is BE is the ancestor of AE and both become two EVs with their own respective characters.…”