Language and Speech最新文献

Fundamental frequency (F0) has been widely studied and used in the context of speaker discrimination and forensic voice comparison casework, but most previous studies focused on long-term F0 statistics. Lexical tone, the linguistically structured and dynamic aspects of F0, has received much less research attention. A main methodological issue lies on how tonal F0 should be parameterized for the best speaker discrimination performance. This paper compares the speaker discriminatory performance of three approaches with lexical tone modeling: discrete cosine transform (DCT), polynomial curve fitting, and quantitative target approximation (qTA). Results show that using parameters based on DCT and polynomials led to similarly promising performance, whereas those based on qTA generally yielded relatively poor performance. Implications modeling surface tonal F0 and the underlying articulatory processes for speaker discrimination are discussed.

Previous research has shown that it is difficult for English speakers to distinguish the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ from the back rounded vowels /u/ and /o/. In this study, we examine the effect of noise on this perceptual difficulty. In an Oddity Discrimination Task, English speakers without any knowledge of German were asked to discriminate between German-sounding pseudowords varying in the vowel both in quiet and in white noise at two signal-to-noise ratios (8 and 0 dB). In test trials, vowels of the same height were contrasted with each other, whereas a contrast with /a/ served as a control trial. Results revealed that a contrast with /a/ remained stable in every listening condition for both high and mid vowels. When contrasting vowels of the same height, however, there was a perceptual shift along the F2 dimension as the noise level increased. Although the /ø/-/o/ and particularly /y/-/u/ contrasts were the most difficult in quiet, accuracy on /i/-/y/ and /e/-/ø/ trials decreased immensely when the speech signal was masked. The German control group showed the same pattern, albeit less severe than the non-native group, suggesting that even in low-level tasks with pseudowords, there is a native advantage in speech perception in noise.

The starting-small effect is a cognitive advantage in language acquisition when learners begin by generalizing on regularities from structurally simple and shorter tokens in a skewed input distribution. Our study explored this effect as a potential explanation for the biased learning of opaque and transparent vowel harmony. In opaque vowel harmony, feature agreement occurs strictly between adjacent vowels, and an intervening "neutral vowel" blocks long-distance vowel harmony. Thus, opaque vowel harmony could be acquired even if learners start with structurally simpler and more frequent disyllabic tokens. Alternatively, transparent vowel harmony can only be observed in longer tokens demonstrating long-distance agreement by skipping a neutral vowel. Opaque vowel harmony is predicted to be learned more efficiently due to its compatibility with local dependency acquired via starting-small learning. In two artificial grammar learning experiments, learners were exposed to both vowel harmony patterns embedded in an equal number of disyllabic and trisyllabic tokens or a skewed distribution with twice as many disyllabic tokens. In Exp I, learners' test performance suggests the consistently biased learning of local and opaque vowel harmony with starting-small learning. Furthermore, in Exp II, the acquired vowel harmony patterns varied significantly by working memory capacity with a balanced but not skewed input distribution, presumably because of the ease of cognitive demand with starting-small learning.

Adapting one's speaking style is particularly crucial as children start interacting with diverse conversational partners in various communication contexts. The study investigated the capacity of preschool children aged 3-5 years (n = 28) to modify their speaking styles in response to background noise, referred to as noise-adapted speech, and when talking to an interlocutor who pretended to have hearing loss, referred to as clear speech. We examined how two modified speaking styles differed across the age range. Prosody features of conversational, noise-adapted, and clear speech were analyzed, including F0 mean (Hz), F0 range (Hz), energy in 1-3 kHz range (dB), speaking rate (syllables per second), and the number of pauses. Preschoolers adjusted their prosody features in response to auditory feedback interruptions (i.e., noise-adapted speech), while developmental changes were observed across the age range for clear speech. To examine the functional effect of the modified hyper-speech produced by the preschoolers, speech intelligibility was also examined in adult listeners (n = 30). The study found that speech intelligibility was higher in noise-adapted speech than in conversational speech across the preschool age range. A noticeable increase in speech intelligibility for clear speech was observed with the increasing age of preschool talkers, aligning with the age-related enhancements in acoustic prosody for clear speech. The findings indicate that children progressively develop their ability to modify speech in challenging environments, initiating and refining adaptations to better accommodate their listeners.

Listeners adjust their perception of sound categories when confronted with variations in speech. Previous research on speech recalibration has primarily focused on segmental variation, demonstrating that recalibration tends to be specific to individual speakers and situations and often persists over time. In this study, we present findings on the perceptual learning of lexical tone in Standard Chinese, a suprasegmental feature signaled primarily through pitch variations to distinguish morpheme/word meanings. Native speakers of Standard Chinese showed a recalibration of tone category boundaries immediately following exposure to ambiguous tonal pitch contours. However, this recalibration effect significantly weakened after 12 hours. Furthermore, participants trained at night did not exhibit delayed stabilization, a phenomenon commonly observed during sleep-induced consolidation. Our results replicate previous findings and provide new evidence suggesting that while our perceptual system can flexibly adapt to real-time sensory inputs, subsequent consolidation processes, such as those occurring during sleep, may exhibit selectivity and, under certain conditions, may be ineffective.

The standard Beijing variety of Mandarin has a clear alveolar-retroflex contrast for phonemes featuring voiceless sibilant frication (i.e., /s/, /ʂ/, /ʈs/, /ʈʂ/, /ʈsʰ/, /ʈʂʰ/). However, some studies show that varieties in the 'outer circle', such in Taiwan, have a reduced contrast for these speech sounds via a process known as 'deretroflexion'. The variety of Mandarin spoken in Singapore is also considered as 'outer circle', as it exhibits influences from Min Nan varieties. We investigated how bilinguals of Singapore Mandarin and English perceive and produce speech tokens in minimal pairs differing only in the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation. In all, 50 participants took part in two tasks. In Task 1, participants performed a lexical identification task for minimal pairs differing only the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation, as spoken by native speakers of two varieties: Beijing Mandarin and Singapore Mandarin. No difference in comprehension of the words was observed between the two varieties indicating that both varieties contain sufficient acoustic information for discrimination. In Task 2, participants read aloud from the list of minimal pairs while their voices were recorded. Acoustic analysis revealed that the phonemes do indeed differ acoustically in terms of center of gravity of the frication and in an alternative measure: long-term averaged spectra. The magnitude of this difference appears to be smaller than previously reported differences for the Beijing variety. These findings show that although some deretroflexion is evident in the speech of bilinguals of the Singaporean variety of Mandarin, it does not translate to ambiguity in the speech signal.

The current study investigates the average effect: the tendency for humans to appreciate an averaged (face, bird, wristwatch, car, and so on) over an individual instance. The effect holds across cultures, despite varying conceptualizations of attractiveness. While much research has been conducted on the average effect in visual perception, much less is known about the extent to which this effect applies to language and speech. This study investigates the attractiveness of average speech rhythms in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese, two typologically different languages. This was tested in a series of perception experiments in either language in which native listeners chose the most attractive one from a pair of acoustically manipulated rhythms. For each language, two experiments were carried out to control for the potential influence of the acoustic manipulation on the average effect. The results confirm the average effect in both languages, and they do not exclude individual variation in the listeners' perception of attractiveness. The outcomes provide a new crosslinguistic perspective and give rise to alternative explanations to the average effect.

Persian polar questions are characterized by a rise-fall followed by a low F0 plateau and a final rise. A production experiment was designed which systematically manipulated question length and the position of stress in the nuclear accented word in the question. Results revealed that distances between tones can strongly affect their scaling and alignment in predictable manner. With respect to scaling, our data show that the postnuclear low F0 target is realized considerably higher in short questions in which tonal crowding is more acute. This scaling adjustment of the L affects the following H tone, such that the final H is realized higher in tonal space, relative to the other crowding contexts. The results for duration show that in short questions, syllable duration is significantly lengthened so that there is room for tonal targets to be realized. In addition, the alignment data in this study suggest that crowding contexts incrementally affect the temporal adjustment of tonal targets. In some circumstances, tonal crowding results in anticipatory retraction of tones, while in others it results in carry-over tonal displacement depending on the direction of the prosodic pressure. These results can best be explained in an auto-segmental approach to intonational phonology in which intonation contours are treated as strings of distinct high and low tones associated with specific elements in the segmental string.

Infants' speech perception is characterized by substantial changes during the first year of life that attune the processing mechanisms to the specific properties of the ambient language. This paper focuses on these developmental changes in vowel perception. More specifically, the emergence and potential cause of perceptual asymmetries in vowel perception are investigated by an experimental study on German 6- and 9-month-olds' discrimination of a vowel contrast that is not phonemic in German. Results show discrimination without any asymmetry in the 6-month-olds but an asymmetrical pattern with better performance when the vowel changes from the less focal to the more focal vowel than vice versa by the 9-month-olds. The results concerning the asymmetries are compatible with the Natural Referent Framework as well as with the Native Language Magnet model. Our results foster two main conclusions. First, bi-directional testing must be mandatory when testing vowel perception. Second, when testing non-native vowel perception, the relation of the stimuli to the native language vowel system has to be considered very carefully as this system impacts the perception of non-native vowels.

Previous investigations have shown various interactions between spatial concepts and speech sounds. For instance, the front-high vowel [i] is associated with the concept of forward, and the back-high vowel [o] is associated with the concept of backward. Three experiments investigated whether the concepts of forward/front and backward/back are associated with high- and low-pitched vocalizations, respectively, in Finnish. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants associated the high-pitched vocalization with the forward-directed movement and the low-pitched vocalizations with the backward-directed movement. In Experiment 3, the same effect was observed in relation to the concepts of front of and back of. We propose that these observations present a novel sound-space symbolism phenomenon in which spatial concepts of forward/front and backward/back are iconically associated with high- and low-pitched speech sounds. This observation is discussed in relation to the grounding of semantic knowledge of these spatial concepts in the movements of articulators such as relative front/back-directed movements of the tongue.