Talker-specific pronunciation or speech error? Discounting (or not) atypical pronunciations during speech perception.

Abstract

Perceptual recalibration allows listeners to adapt to talker-specific pronunciations, such as atypical realizations of specific sounds. Such recalibration can facilitate robust speech recognition. However, indiscriminate recalibration following any atypically pronounced words also risks interpreting pronunciations as characteristic of a talker that are in reality because of incidental, short-lived factors (such as a speech error). We investigate whether the mechanisms underlying perceptual recalibration involve inferences about the causes for unexpected pronunciations. In 5 experiments, we ask whether perceptual recalibration is blocked if the atypical pronunciations of an unfamiliar talker can also be attributed to other incidental causes. We investigated 3 type of incidental causes for atypical pronunciations: the talker is intoxicated, the talker speaks unusually fast, or the atypical pronunciations occur only in the context of tongue twisters. In all 5 experiments, we find robust evidence for perceptual recalibration, but little evidence that the presence of incidental causes block perceptual recalibration. We discuss these results in light of other recent findings that incidental causes can block perceptual recalibration.

Influence of face masks on recalibration of phonetic categories

“…Moreover, when the mask was over the mouth throughout the duration of exposure for both clear and ambiguous tokens (Experiment 4), listeners demonstrated adaptation in line with biasing condition, suggesting that seeing the mask over the mouth throughout exposure did not alter categorization decisions. Our results converge with existing research demonstrating that listeners either ignored the external factor or that not all external factors are weighted equally in speech adaptation (e.g., Liu & Jaeger, 2019;Kraljic & Samuel, 2011;Drouin et al, 2018). However, our results diverge from previous research demonstrating that external cues can causally alter how listeners accommodate the input (e.g., Kraljic et al, 2008;McAuliffe & Babel, 2016).…”

“…However, not all instruction-based manipulations appear to influence phonetic recalibration in the same way. For example, in a series of experiments, Liu and Jaeger (2019) provided alternate causes for atypical speech productions: ambiguous speech in tongue twister contexts, ambiguous speech for a talker with a fast-speaking rate, and ambiguous speech for a talker who listeners were told was intoxicated. Participants demonstrated phonetic recalibration in each experiment and the magnitude of adaptation did not attenuate despite listeners having a clear factor (either implicit or explicit) for the ambiguity.…”

“…The face mask over the mouth used in our experiment did not parallel the pen in the mouth finding (Kraljic et al, 2008), suggesting that the pen and the mask acted differently as an external cue. Indeed, previous studies have shown that not all external factors are weighted equally; listeners maintain phonetic category adjustments even when given explicit instructions that the talker produces ambiguous or intoxicated speech (McAuliffe & Babel, 2016;Liu and Jaeger, 2019) or when completing perception-oriented exposure tasks (e.g., Drouin et al, 2018;Van Linden & Vroomen, 2008).…”

Cross-talker generalization in the perception of nonnative speech: A large-scale replication.

“…One difference from BB08 is that our replications were conducted over the web. This decision was motivated by practical, rather than theoretical, considerations, in order to facilitate the recruitment of a large number of participants (see also Liu & Jaeger, 2018; 2019). However, web-based recruitment entails (a) a more heterogeneous participants group, (b) less control over the way participants approach the task, and (c) more variability in auditory equipment across participants.…”

Unintelligible Speech: Listeners' Awareness to Indonesian-Accented Speech With Pronunciation Errors

“…Copious studies on pronunciation in relation to intelligibility and foreign accent have been sought, and the utmost of them focus on the pronunciation purely (Rahimi & Ruzrokh, 2016;Suntornsawet, 2019) and also on the perception of accented speech (Behrman et al, 2020;Sereno et al, 2016). Furthermore, several pieces of research about perception on pronunciation errors have been found related to accented speech on the level of segmental (Gao & Weinberger, 2018;Lindemann, 2017;Liu & Jaeger, 2019). Segmental errors of both consonants and vowels are the primary origin of the listeners' trouble to measure the speech's intelligibility (Levis, 2018).…”