Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

Kleinschmidt, Dave F.

doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1500698

Cited by 48 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 77 publications

(161 reference statements)

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“…Thus, these Scottish English speakers exhibit structured variability in spontaneous speech, for all three cues to stop voicing. Our findings are consistent with Chodroff and Wilson's (2018) suggestion that the presence of structured variation within phonetic cues helps listeners discern linguistic contrasts, while other speaker variation facilitates recognition of interspeaker differences in phonetic realization, both personal (Goldinger 1998, Kleinschmidt 2019 and systematic, such as social-indexical contrasts (Docherty & Foulkes 2000). Speakers both are signaling the stop voicing contrast with each of the three cues and systematically differ from each other with respect to age and time in how they use the cues to realize the contrast.…”

Section: 1supporting

confidence: 90%

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth century

Sonderegger¹,

Stuart‐Smith²,

Knowles³

et al. 2020

Language

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How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this 'structured heterogeneity' to language change, has been a key focus over fifty years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering 'structured variability'-how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in nonrandom ways-as part of the long-standing goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community's language that illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This article examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues-voice onset time and closure voicing-along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, toward a more aspirationbased and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation.*

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Section: 1supporting

confidence: 90%

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth century

Sonderegger¹,

Stuart‐Smith²,

Knowles³

et al. 2020

Language

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“…Variation in the acoustic realization of speech across talkers is the principal source of phonetic variability in speech signals (Kleinschmidt, 2019). Listeners are nonetheless highly successful in extracting stable phonemic information from talkers' speech despite the lack of consistent acoustic-phonetic mapping (Pierrehumbert, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kapadia

Perrachione

2020

Cognition

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“…First, the disparate results may reflect the role of lexical information in guiding interpretation of acoustic input; distributional statistics of the input may be discarded when lexical information constrains online phonetic categorization. Second, statistical sensitivity for spectral versus temporal properties of speech may differ, to the extent that spectral properties are more informative of talker identity than temporal properties (Kleinschmidt, 2018). Third, the apparent discrepancy may reflect how predictions for local versus global accounts were derived.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributional learning for speech reflects cumulative exposure to a talker’s phonetic distributions

Theodore

Monto

2019

Psychon Bull Rev

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Efficient speech perception requires listeners to maintain an exquisite tension between stability of the language architecture and flexibility to accommodate variation in the input, such as that associated with individual talker differences in speech production. Achieving this tension can be guided by top-down learning mechanisms, wherein lexical information constrains interpretation of speech input, and by bottom-up learning mechanisms, in which distributional information in the speech signal is used to optimize the mapping to speech sound categories. An open question for theories of perceptual learning concerns the nature of the representations that are built for individual talkers: do these representations reflect long-term, global exposure to a talker or rather only short-term, local exposure? Recent research suggests that when lexical knowledge is used to resolve a talker's ambiguous productions, listeners disregard previous experience with a talker and instead rely on only recent experience, a finding that is contrary to predictions of Bayesian belief-updating accounts of perceptual adaptation. Here we use a distributional learning paradigm in which lexical information is not explicitly required to resolve ambiguous input to provide an additional test of global versus local exposure accounts. Listeners completed two blocks of phonetic categorization for stimuli that differed in voiceonset-time, a probabilistic cue to the voicing contrast in English stop consonants. In each block, two distributions were presented, one specifying /g/ and one specifying /k/. Across the two blocks, variance of the distributions was manipulated to be either narrow or wide. The critical manipulation was order of the two blocks; half of the listeners were first exposed to the narrow distributions followed by the wide distributions, with the order reversed for the other half of the listeners. The results showed that for earlier trials, the identification slope was steeper for the narrow-wide group compared to the wide-narrow group, but this difference was attenuated for later trials. The between-group convergence was driven by an asymmetry in learning between the two orders such that only those in the narrow-wide group showed slope movement during exposure, a pattern that was mirrored by computational simulations in which the distributional statistics of the present talker were integrated with prior experience with English. This pattern of results suggests that listeners did not disregard all prior experience with the talker, and instead used cumulative exposure to guide phonetic decisions, which raises the possibility that accommodating a talker's phonetic signature entails maintaining representations that reflect global experience.

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Structure in talker variability: How much is there and how much can it help?

Cited by 48 publications

References 77 publications

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth century

Structured heterogeneity in Scottish stops over the twentieth century

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

Distributional learning for speech reflects cumulative exposure to a talker’s phonetic distributions

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