How speaker identity interacts with perceptual judgments in children with residual sound errors

Abstract

Recent research suggests that listeners store complex phonetic representations when learning speech. Encoding fine perceptual details, such as indexical features of the talker’s voice, appears to influence performance in a variety of ways (e.g., processing speed and intelligibility of words in noise). Children with residual sound errors (RSE) for /r/ have been shown to have difficulty judging productions of /r/ from other child speakers along a normalized continuum of third formant values. We hypothesized that children with RSE may make more accurate judgments if they are given stimuli with more familiar indexical characteristics (i.e., their own speech) along the same continuum. In this study, we presented 15 children with a range of stimuli recorded from their own productions as well as productions from other children. In a forced-choice task, children indicated if the word contained a “correct” /r/. Responses to stimuli were compared across children. Initial results suggest that for RSE children, hearing one’s own speech does not improve accuracy in judging the correctness of sounds in words.