Sociophonetic Applications of Speech Perception Experiments

Thomas, Erik R.

doi:10.1215/00031283-77-2-115

Cited by 102 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…However, in recent years, sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have started to more fully appreciate the value of investigating the perception of linguistic variation as a key dimension in the building of sociolinguistic theory. The findings from speech perception studies can, for instance, provide valuable information regarding the robustness of non-linguist listeners' perceptual labels of specific social and regional varieties as well as help identify the (socio)linguistic features which determine their classification and, in turn, shed greater light upon the extent to which researchers' own categorisations of language varieties map on to those of the speech communities under consideration (for an overview see Thomas, 2002). Researchers currently investigate a broad range of sociolinguistic and sociopsychological issues related to the perception of spoken linguistic diversity, most frequently through the presentation of speech stimulus comprising a series of words and/or short phrases to listeners, including: the extent to which perceived personal traits of individual speakers are based upon voice; how speakers of different languages or language varieties classify and label the same sounds; listeners' ability to perceive vowel mergers and splits; the speech perception abilities of special listeners; the influence of hearers' stereotypes on the perception of sounds; and the ability of listeners' to identify and subsequently categorise the language variety spoken and/or the geographical origin of the speaker.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

McKenzie

2015

Language Awareness

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In addition to the examination of non-linguists' evaluations of different speech varieties, in recent years, sociolinguists and sociophoneticians have afforded greater attention towards the ways in which naïve listeners' perceive, process and encode spoken language variation, including the identification of language varieties as regionally or socially localised forms. The present study attempts to extend understanding of non-linguists' perceptions of linguistic diversity through the investigation of how accurately and consistently UK-born students, resident in the north-east of England, can identify the speaker place of origin of six forms of L1 and L2 English. The results demonstrate that whilst the process of encoding indexical properties to and categorisations of speech stimulus as belonging to a specific language variety is complex, there is a clear tendency amongst informants to initially identify the speech as either native or non-native, most especially through the perception of specific segmental and non-segmental phonological features, before attempting more fine-grained classifications. The findings also point to the recognition of speaker place of origin at different levels of awareness, above and below the level of individual consciousness.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

McKenzie

2015

Language Awareness

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“…An understanding of the role of sociolinguistic variation in speech perception and production is essential for a complete theory of spoken language processing. The growing field of sociophonetics draws on experimental methods developed in acoustic phonetics and speech science to investigate the role of this source of information in the production, perception, and cognitive representation of linguistic variation (Thomas, 2002;Foulkes & Docherty, 2006). Several recent studies on the perception of sociophonetic variation have used speech samples produced by talkers from different regions of the United States and the Netherlands to examine naïve listeners' identification and categorization of different linguistic varieties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free classification of regional dialects of American English

Clopper

Pisoni

2007

Journal of Phonetics

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Recent studies have found that naïve listeners perform poorly in forced-choice dialect categorization tasks. However, the listeners' error patterns in these tasks reveal systematic confusions between phonologically similar dialects. In the present study, a free classification procedure was used to measure the perceptual similarity structure of regional dialect variation in the United States. In two experiments, participants listened to a set of short English sentences produced by male talkers only (Experiment 1) and by male and female talkers (Experiment 2). The listeners were instructed to group the talkers by regional dialect into as many groups as they wanted with as many talkers in each group as they wished. Multidimensional scaling analyses of the data revealed three primary dimensions of perceptual similarity (linguistic markedness, geography, and gender). In addition, a comparison of the results obtained from the free classification task to previous results using the same stimulus materials in six-alternative forcedchoice categorization tasks revealed that response biases in the six-alternative task were reduced or eliminated in the free classification task. Thus, the results obtained with the free classification task in the current study provided further evidence that the underlying structure of perceptual dialect category representations reflects important linguistic and sociolinguistic factors.

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“…In particular, a listener can use knowledge about group-conditioned cue distributions in order to evaluate which group best explains the cues they have observed from a talker, and hence which group they are likely to belong to. 1 As with the previous two questions, there is some evidence that listeners can in fact make these sorts of socio-indexical inferences on the basis of speech alone (for a review, see Thomas, 2002). For instance, listeners can classify talker's regional dialect at above-chance accuracy based on a short except of their speech (a single sentence read from a standard set Clopper & Pisoni, 2006;Clopper & Pisoni, 2007).…”

Section: Question 3: How Well Could Listeners Infer Socio-indexical Vmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception in a Variable but Structured World: The Case of Speech Perception

Kleinschmidt¹

2017

Preprint

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Perceptual systems have to make sense out of a world that is not only noisy and ambiguous, but that also varies from situation to situation. Human speech perception is a perceptual domain where this problem has long been acknowledged: individual talkers vary substantially in how they produce linguistic units using acoustic cues. Yet, how the speech system solves this problem of talker variability remains poorly understood. This thesis presents a computational framework---the ideal adapter---for understanding this problem and how the speech perception system solves it. The basic insight of this framework is that variability in speech is not arbitrary but rather structured: talkers are reasonably consistent in the way they produce cues, and individual talkers tend to cluster into groups by gender, regional background, etc. This structure means that listeners can use their previous experience with other talkers to guide perception of unfamiliar talkers, as well as familiar talkers that they encounter again. This framework unifies a large and messy literature on how listeners cope with talker variability, leads to quantitative models that provide good fits to human behavior in a variety of situations, and makes specific, testable predictions that open up new frontiers in understanding speech perception. This framework also applies to perception in general, and highlights how speech perception can serve as a model organism for understanding how perceptual systems cope with a variable but structured world.

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Sociophonetic Applications of Speech Perception Experiments

Cited by 102 publications

References 83 publications

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners

Free classification of regional dialects of American English

Perception in a Variable but Structured World: The Case of Speech Perception

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