Abstract
In different tasks involving action perception, performance has been found to be facilitated when the presented stimuli were produced by the participants themselves rather than by another participant. These results suggest that the same mental representations are accessed during both production and perception. However, with regard to spoken word perception, evidence also suggests that listeners’ representations for speech reflect the input from their surrounding linguistic community rather than their own idiosyncratic productions. Furthermore, speech perception is heavily influenced by indexical cues that may lead listeners to frame their interpretations of incoming speech signals with regard to speaker identity. In order to determine whether word recognition evinces similar self-advantages as found in action perception, it was necessary to eliminate indexical cues from the speech signal. We therefore asked participants to identify noise-vocoded versions of Dutch words that were based on either their own recordings or those of a statistically average speaker. The majority of participants were more accurate for the average speaker than for themselves, even after taking into account differences in intelligibility. These results suggest that the speech representations accessed during perception of noise-vocoded speech are more reflective of the input of the speech community, and hence that speech perception is not necessarily based on representations of one’s own speech.
Highlights
Speech production does not operate in a vacuum, free from the influences of its perceptual counterpart; the two processes are coupled and closely linked. [1]PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129731 July 2, 2015Perceptual Benefit for Speech of an Average Speaker Compared to SelfTo someone unfamiliar with the field of speech research, it may seem odd that such a statement needs to be expressed explicitly considering how natural the link between the production and perception of speech appears to be
While individuals varied with respect to their accuracy, responses were much more accurate for Easy words (μ = 0.57, SE = 0.012) than Hard words (μ = 0.37, SE = 0.012) and moderately more accurate for words in the Average Speaker condition (μ = 0.49, SE = 0.012) than in the Self condition (μ = 0.45, SE = 0.012)
This study examined one facet of the debate on the nature of representations of speech, namely whether incoming speech is decoded with reference to representations that are more reflective of the overall speech community or more reflective of the listener’s own productions
Summary
Speech production does not operate in a vacuum, free from the influences of its perceptual counterpart; the two processes are coupled and closely linked. [1]PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129731 July 2, 2015Perceptual Benefit for Speech of an Average Speaker Compared to SelfTo someone unfamiliar with the field of speech research, it may seem odd that such a statement needs to be expressed explicitly considering how natural the link between the production and perception of speech appears to be. At the opposite extreme, others propose that speech perception crucially relies on production mechanisms [6], in concordance with certain theories of action perception [7]. We test listeners’ perception of a type of spectrally manipulated speech, noise-vocoded speech, in which indexical cues have been largely eliminated. Testing perception of such speech allows us to investigate whether listeners are better at perceiving their own speech or the speech of another person in the absence of primary phonetic cues to speaker identity, and how this may enrich our understanding of the coupling between production and perception mechanisms
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