Wait for it! Stronger influence of context on categorical perception in Danish than Norwegian

Abstract

Speech input is often noisy and ambiguous. Yet listenersusually do not have difficulties understanding it. A keyhypothesis is that in speech processing acoustic-phoneticbottom-up processing is complemented by top-downcontextual information. This context effect is larger when theambiguous word is only separated from a disambiguating word by a few syllables compared to many syllables, suggesting that there is a limited time window for processing acoustic-phonetic information with the help of context. Here, we argue that the relative weight of bottom-up and top-down processes may be different for languages that have different phonological properties. We report an experiment comparing two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We show that Danish speakers do indeed rely on context more than Norwegian speakers do. These results highlight the importance of investigating cross-linguistic differences in speech processing, suggesting that speakers of different languages may develop different language processing strategies.

Danish as a Window Onto Language Processing and Learning

“…For instance, Ishkhanyan et al. (2019) tested adult native speakers of Danish and Norwegian on a categorical perception paradigm designed to measure contextual (top‐down) biasing on phoneme identification. The onsets of the Danish and Norwegian cognate words sendt ([ˈsɛnˀt] “sent”) and tændt ([ˈt s ɛnˀt] “lit”) were manipulated to generate target words whose initial phoneme varied on a continuum between [s] and [t s ] 2 .…”

Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception: Comparison of Danish and Norwegian

“…While the relative contribution of bottom-up vs. top-down information in language processing has been the subject of longstanding debate (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;Christiansen & Chater, 2016;Kintsch, 2005;Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978;Roark, 2001), recent work suggests that top-down processes become especially relevant when the quality of acoustic-phonetic information decreases (e.g., Beretti et al, 2020;Chodroff & Wilson, 2020;Szostak & Pitt, 2013;Bushong & Jaeger, 2017;Borsky, Tuller & Shapiro, 1998;Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 2001). Motivated by recent evidence from Danish and Norwegian (Ishkhanyan et al, 2019;Trecca et al, 2019), we here explore whether the balance between bottom-up and top-down processes might also be affected by cross-linguistic differences between these two languages.…”