Tracking the time course of individuals' perception and production of coarticulated speech

Abstract

Pioneering research by James J. Jenkins and colleagues has demonstrated the importance for speech perception of the dynamic information specified across the syllable. Collaborative work in our lab builds on this tradition of studying listeners' use of dynamic information by investigating perception of coarticulatory information as it unfolds in real time. We are currently studying listener-specific strategies for attending to coarticulatory dynamics, and are asking whether these strategies are linked to that individual's own production patterns. I will report the results of experiments that test the hypothesis that individuals who attend to coarticulatory information especially closely in perception also produce more consistent and extensive coarticulation. The perceptual measure is the time course of participants' use of coarticulated vowel nasality in CVNC words as measured via eye tracking; the production measure is the time course of these participants' nasal airflow while producing CVNC words. Results support our hypothesis: participants who produced earlier onset of coarticulatory nasalization were, as listeners, more efficient users of that information as it became available to them. Thus, a listener's use of the dynamics of speech is predicted, to some degree, by that individual's production patterns. [Work supported by NSF grant BCS-1348150.]