The time course of perception of coarticulation

Abstract

The perception of coarticulated speech as it unfolds over time was investigated by monitoring eye movements of participants as they listened to words with oral vowels or with late or early onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization. When listeners heard [CṼNC] and had visual choices of images of CVNC (e.g., send) and CVC (said) words, they fixated more quickly and more often on the CVNC image when onset of nasalization began early in the vowel compared to when the coarticulatory information occurred later. Moreover, when a standard eye movement programming delay is factored in, fixations on the CVNC image began to occur before listeners heard the nasal consonant. Listeners' attention to coarticulatory cues for velum lowering was selective in two respects: (a) listeners assigned greater perceptual weight to coarticulatory information in phonetic contexts in which [Ṽ] but not N is an especially robust property, and (b) individual listeners differed in their perceptual weights. Overall, the time course of perception of velum lowering in American English indicates that the dynamics of perception parallel the dynamics of the gestural information encoded in the acoustic signal. In real-time processing, listeners closely track unfolding coarticulatory information in ways that speed lexical activation.

Online perception of glottalized coda stops in American English

“…As we discussed earlier, listeners are sensitive both to the appropriateness of coarticulatory cues for an upcoming sound (Dahan et al, 2001;Dahan & Tanenhaus, 2004;Gow & McMurray, 2007), as well as to the specific timing of when coarticulatory cues become available in the speech signal (Beddor et al, 2013;Salverda et al, 2014). For instance, Beddor et al (2013) showed that listeners' fixations converged on a CVNC word (e.g., bent) more quickly when nasalization started early in the vowel than when it started late in the vowel.…”

“…We were interested in looking at two measures, following Beddor et al (2013). The first was the latency of the first correct fixation to the target word.…”

“…For instance, Beddor et al (2013) showed that listeners' fixations converged on a CVNC word (e.g., bent) more quickly when nasalization started early in the vowel than when it started late in the vowel.…”

“…Beddor et al (2013) investigated the timecourse of listeners' perception of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in American English. Participants heard cross-spliced target words (e.g., bent) with nasalization starting early or late in the vowel while looking at two pictures on a display.…”

Cognitive basis of individual differences in speech perception, production and representations: The role of domain general attentional switching

“…A growing body of work has focused on the individual differences in the perception of the acoustic cues that define sound contrasts, and shown that this relation may vary as a function of factors such as language background (Escudero & Boersma, 2004;Schertz, Cho, Lotto, & Warner, 2015), cue weighting strategy (Beddor, McGowan, Boland, Coetzee, & Brasher, 2013;Kong & Edwards, 2011), as well as cognitive abilities (e.g. attention: Janse & Adank, 2012; working memory: Francis & Nusbaum, 2009; cognitive processing style: Stewart & Ota, 2008;Yu, 2010).…”