Exemplar Theory Research Articles

Active Models in Speech Perception: A Critical Review in Phonetics

This critical review examines four prominent active models of speech perception: quantal theory, motor theory, hyper-hypo-articulation theory, and exemplar theory. Each of these models offers distinctive insights into how listeners perceive, interpret, and categorize speech sounds. Quantal theory explores the non-linear relationship between articulation and acoustic output, emphasizing stable and unstable regions in speech production. Motor theory posits that speech perception is grounded in articulatory gestures, suggesting a direct link between production and perception. The hyper-hypo-articulation theory focuses on the speaker’s adaptive articulation, which ranges from hyper- to hypo-articulation depending on the listener's needs and the communicative context. Exemplar theory, rooted in cognitive psychology, highlights the role of memory and experience, with individual speech sounds compared to stored exemplars in memory to aid perception. Despite their contributions, none of these models offers a comprehensive solution to all speech perception challenges. Each theory is suited to specific contexts, speech features, or tasks, making it crucial for researchers to understand their limitations. Furthermore, the review underscores the importance of selecting the appropriate model for particular research or practical applications, given the variability in their functionality. Finally, it calls for future research to delve deeper into passive models of speech perception and suggests that comparative studies between active and passive models could yield valuable insights.

Sociolinguistic Style, Awareness, and Agency among Southern California Latinx Spanish–English Bilinguals

This study examined different degrees of awareness regarding the stigmatization of Southern California (SoCal) Spanish across four groups of Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern California (n = 87). The participants were presented with Spanish sentences and asked to decide which profile of speaker would likely express that sentence, given six options, such as: “someone living in Los Angeles/SoCal who grew up in Mexico” or “a Spanish-English bilingual who grew up in Los Angeles/SoCal”. Experimental stimuli included seven different linguistic categories of stigmatization, including English contact forms. The participants tended to attribute the stigmatized forms to bilinguals who grew up in Southern California. Central Colloquial and Taboo categories were more salient and perceived as forms used by people in Mexico. In contrast, English borrowings and redundancies seemed to be recognized by the participants, particularly for simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in Southern California, as salient forms of an identified Southern California Spanish variety. The results are interpreted within Exemplar Theory, with certain stigmatized forms indexing “Mexican Spanish” exemplars, and English borrowings identified as exemplars of SoCal Spanish. We advocate for usage-based approaches to understanding language perceptions and critical approaches to interrogating academic discourses.

Evidence accumulation is not essential for generating intertemporal preference: A comparison of dynamic cognitive models of matching tasks

Intertemporal preference has been investigated mainly with a choice paradigm. However, a matching paradigm might be more informative for a proper inference about intertemporal preference and a deep understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This research involved two empirical studies using the matching paradigm and compared various corresponding dynamic models. These models were developed under either the framework of decision field theory, an exemplar theory assuming evidence accumulation, or a non-evidence-accumulation framework built upon the well-established notions of random utility and discrimination threshold (i.e., the RUDT framework). Most of these models were alternative-based whereas the others were attribute-based ones. Participants in Study 1 were required to fill in the amount of an immediate stimulus to make it as attractive as a delayed stimulus, whereas those in Study 2 needed to accomplish a more general matching task in which either the payoff amount or delay length of one stimulus was missing. Consistent behavioral regularities regarding both matching values and response times were revealed in these studies. The results of model comparison favored in general the RUDT framework as well as an attribute-based perspective on intertemporal preference. In addition, the predicted matching values and response times of the best RUDT model were also highly correlated with the observed data and replicated most observed behavioral regularities. Together, this research and previous modeling work on intertemporal choice suggest that evidence accumulation is not essential for generating intertemporal preference. Future research should examine the validity of the new framework in other preferential decisions for a more stringent test of the framework.

Dialect perception in song versus speech

Investigations into style-shift in singing led to the proposal of genre-specific musical sociolects [Coupland, 2011, J. of Soc. 15]. Gibson [2019, Univ. of Canterbury Dissertation] demonstrated that style-shift in popular music is automatic. Additionally, Mageau et al. [2019, Phonetica 76] found non-native English speakers have a less perceptible foreign accent while singing than speaking. These findings provide possible behavioral analogues to the differential processing of speech and song. Gibson [2019, UofCanterbury Dissertation] accounts for this using Todd et al’s [2019, Cognition 185] exemplar theory, emphasizing the role of sung and spoken contexts in perception. We investigate the role of musical context in accent identification. 24 participants completed a dialect-identification task of 32 musical clips from two genres with strong sociocultural associations: country and reggae. 16 clips contained the original instrumental-removed vocals, and 16 different clips from the same songs additionally underwent monotonization and rhythm-normalization. Responses to the manipulated stimuli were more varied than the original vocals. Listeners’ judgements may be more closely tied to country and reggae’s sociocultural associations than speech information itself. These findings counter Mageau et al., illuminating a more complex relationship between accent perception, music, and genre. Future work will investigate this for dialect-nonspecific genres and adjust approaches to stimuli manipulation.

Updating constructions: additive effects of prior and current experience during sentence production.

While much earlier work has indicated that prior verb bias from lifelong language experience influences language processing, recent findings highlight the fact that verb biases induced during lab-based exposure sessions also influence processing. We investigated the nature of updating, i.e.,how prior and current experience might interact in guiding subsequent sentence production. Participants underwent a short training session where we manipulated the bias of known English dative verbs. The prior bias of each verb for the double-object (DO) versus the prepositional-object (PO) dative was estimated using a corpus. Current verb bias was counterbalanced and controlled experimentally. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic models of participants' responses (DO or PO) during subsequent free-choice production showed that both the prior and current verb biases affected speakers' construction choice. These effects were additive and not interactive, contrary to the prediction from error-based learning models. Semantic similarity to other verbs and their experimentally manipulated biases influenced sentence production, consistent with item-based analogy and exemplar theory. These results shed light on the potential mechanisms underlying language updating and the adaptation of sentence production to ongoing experience.

Advancement of phonetics in the 21st century: Exemplar models of speech production

In the first decades of the 21st century, exemplar theory has fueled an explosion of theoretical and empirical work in speech production. We review the foundations for this framework in linguistics and cognitive science, and examine how recent empirical findings challenge core principles of exemplar theory. While theoretical advances in hybrid exemplar models address some of these issues, accounting for the emergence of structure, the incorporation of structure into exemplar updating, and the non-uniformity of phonetic variation and convergence (among other phenomena), remain major challenges for current models. We discuss future directions for developing exemplar theories as comprehensive accounts of speech production.

Phonetic and phonological sound changes in an agent-based model

The focus of the study is an agent-based model (ABM) concerned with simulating phonological stability and change using real speech data from a population of speakers. At the core of the model was a flexible and agent-specific association between acoustic exemplars and phonological categories. This was achieved by means of two general-purpose unsupervised machine learning algorithms: the first grouped exemplars into acoustic clusters, the second identified sets of clusters which largely contain exemplars of the same word classes. The model was tested first on data from Standard Southern British English, where a shift of /u/ to the front of the vowel space was expected not to cause any phonological re-categorisation. The simulation indeed showed phonological stability despite the phonetic change. Using the same settings, the ABM was then applied to data from New Zealand English in which a merger of /eə, ɪə/ diphthongs has taken place in the last 50 years. Compatibly with that, the simulation showed a shift from /eə/ towards /ɪə/ along with the neutralisation of the diphthong contrast. The results are discussed with respect to the conditions necessary to model a merger, taking into account both findings on marginal phonological relationships and principles from exemplar theory.

Hearing emotion in two languages: A pupillometry study of Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals’ perception of affective cognates in L1 and L2

AbstractDifferential affective processing has been widely documented for bilinguals: L1 affective words elicit higher levels of arousal and stronger emotionality ratings than L2 affective words (Pavlenko, 2012). In this study, we focus on two closely related Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese, whose affective lexicons are highly overlapping, with shared lexical items that only differ in pronunciation across languages. We recorded L1 Cantonese – L2 Mandarin bilinguals’ pupil responses to auditory tokens of Cantonese and Mandarin affective words. Our results showed that Cantonese–Mandarin bilinguals had stronger pupil responses when the affective words were pronounced in Cantonese (L1) than when the same words were pronounced in Mandarin (L2). The effect was most evident in taboo words and among bilinguals with lower L2 proficiency. We discuss the theoretical implications of the findings in the frameworks of exemplar theory and models of the bilingual lexicon.

Language Contact and Phonological Innovation in the Voiced Prepalatal Obstruents of Judeo-Spanish

This article traces the development of voiced prepalatal obstruents /dʒ⌢/ and /ʒ/ in Judeo-Spanish, the language spoken by the Sephardic Jews since before their expulsion from late-15th century Spain. Using Medieval Spanish as a comparative starting point, we examine diachronic innovations in the phonological status and distribution of affricate /dʒ⌢/ and fricative /ʒ/ in Judeo-Spanish during the diaspora, focusing in particular on the effects of lexical borrowing from Turkish and French in territories of the former Ottoman Empire. In contemporary Sephardic communities that are in contact with non-Sephardic varieties of Mainstream Spanish, some speakers occasionally replace syllable-initial /∫/, /dʒ⌢/, and /ʒ/ in certain Judeo-Spanish words by a voiceless velar /x/ in efforts to accommodate the pronunciation of the corresponding Mainstream Spanish cognate form. We provide a novel analysis of Judeo-Spanish voiced prepalatal obstruents, including their diachronic and synchronic variation under language contact. The analysis combines a constraint-based approach to phonological alternations, as formalized in Optimality Theory, with a usage-based representation of the mental lexicon, as proposed in Exemplar Theory, to account for speaker- and word-specific variability. A hybrid theoretical model provides a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between lexicon and grammar in Judeo-Spanish phonology than is available in previous structuralist descriptions.

Haunting melodies: Specific memories distort beat perception

How much does specific previous experience shape immediate perception? Top-down perceptual inference occurs in ambiguous situations. However, similarity-based accounts such as exemplar theory suggest that similar memories resonate with the percept, predicting that detailed previous experiences can shape perception even when bottom-up cues are unambiguous. The current study tests whether specific musical memories influence beat perception only under ambiguity, or more pervasively—that is, even when clear bottom-up beat cues are present. Listeners were exposed to 16 melodies, half in one meter, half in another. Later, each listener's perception of a specific melody's beat pattern was tested when that melody occurred in either its original meter or another meter. Ratings of metrical probes were influenced not only by fit with the current (test) meter, but also by fit with the meter previously experienced with that melody. Findings suggest that perception is routinely influenced by detailed top-down perceptual imagery.

Nosological Diagnosis, Theories of Categorization, and Argumentations by Analogy.

The nosological diagnosis is a particular type of nontheoretical diagnosis consisting of identifying the disease that afflicts the patient without explaining the underlying etiopathological mechanisms. Its origins are within the essentialist point of view on the nature of diseases, which dates back at least to 18th-century taxonomy studies. In this article, we propose a model of nosological diagnosis as a two-phase process composed of the categorization of inductive inferences and argumentations by analogy. In the inductive phase, disease entities are identified by means of typicality-based categorization processes, and meaningful clinical samples are learned (abstract clinical cases, i.e., syndromes and actual cases); in the subsequent phase, those samples are used as the bases of argumentations by analogy to obtain a diagnosis for a given patient. This model extends the prototype resemblance theory of disease including also the exemplar theory proposed in cognitive science and, moreover, it frames the clinical activity of nosological diagnosis and how it can be explained within the theory of argumentation. According to it, diagnosis based on the recognition of a typical syndrome is explained in terms of the prototype theory of categorization and the antisymmetrical argumentation by analogy, while diagnosis based on a comparison with a previous clinical case is explained by the exemplar theory of categorization and by the symmetrical argumentation by analogy.

A Functional Contextual Account of Background Knowledge in Categorization: Implications for Artificial General Intelligence and Cognitive Accounts of General Knowledge.

Psychology has benefited from an enormous wealth of knowledge about processes of cognition in relation to how the brain organizes information. Within the categorization literature, this behavior is often explained through theories of memory construction called exemplar theory and prototype theory which are typically based on similarity or rule functions as explanations of how categories emerge. Although these theories work well at modeling highly controlled stimuli in laboratory settings, they often perform less well outside of these settings, such as explaining the emergence of background knowledge processes. In order to explain background knowledge, we present a non-similarity-based post-Skinnerian theory of human language called Relational Frame Theory (RFT) which is rooted in a philosophical world view called functional contextualism (FC). This theory offers a very different interpretation of how categories emerge through the functions of behavior and through contextual cues, which may be of some benefit to existing categorization theories. Specifically, RFT may be able to offer a novel explanation of how background knowledge arises, and we provide some mathematical considerations in order to identify a formal model. Finally, we discuss much of this work within the broader context of general semantic knowledge and artificial intelligence research.

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

ABSTRACT Word-based models of morphology propose that complex words are stored without reference to morphemes. One of the questions that arises is whether information about word forms alone is enough to determine a noun's number from its form. We take up this question by modelling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system, using models that do not assume morphemic representations. We use the Tilburg Memory-Based Learner, a computational implementation of exemplar theory and the Naive Discriminative Learner, an implementation of Word and Paradigm, for classification. Both models classify Maltese nouns well. In their current implementations, TiMBL and NDL cannot concatenate sequences of phones that result in word forms. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) to model the production of plurals. We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modelled on the basis of whole words without morphemes, supporting word-based models of morphology.

An OT-ET Analysis of Polish Singular-Plural Pairs

Optimality Theory (OT) and Exemplar Theory (ET) are two enchanting theories to many scholars, but each still faces criticism and remaining persistent problems. Application of both theories to areas in linguistics where conflicts may arise has been attempted, but still the suitability of combining the two theories to resolve contradictions awaits further analysis and verification. This article takes Polish singular-plural pairs as the object of study and argues in favor of an OT-ET combined model of analyzing the linguistic phenomenon. First, an underlying representation is identified to be the input in an OT analysis. Then two main changes are recognized between the input and output, and are regarded as instances of positional neutralization, and their relevant constraints and constraint hierarchies are presented. Following this, challenges are posed to OT despite its merits. It turns out that the combined OT-ET model works well, with historical development, underspecification, constraint hierarchy, and resemblance to existing word clouds, among others, all playing relevant parts. The current study adds to the extensiveness of language data analyzed for or against combining OT and ET, and sketches the analysis pattern of thus doing, with a view to offering more real-life language materials for an OT-ET combined model.

Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants

Abstract This study investigated how the perception of a sound is affected by its phonological and morphological roles within a word. We asked American English listeners (n = 24) to judge differences among phonetic variants of sounds [l], [n], [ɹ] in three word conditions: 1) at morpheme boundaries with a phonological process, such as [n] in down-ed, which triggers voicing agreement on the suffix, 2) internally without a process, such as [n] in mound, and 3) at morpheme boundaries alone, such as [n] in town-ship. We used Praat synthesis with different acoustic settings to create variants, e.g., [n]a, [n]b, [n]c, which were spliced into a base to produce three tokens, dow[n]a ed, dow[n]b ed, dow[n]c ed. Identical variants were used across conditions (e.g., in condition 2: mou[n]a d, mou[n]b d , mou[n]c d). On each trial, participants heard two tokens of the same word (e.g., dow[n]a ed – dow[n]b ed) and rated the difference between the target sound using a sliding scale with endpoints “0% (totally identical)” and “99% (totally different)”. Analysis with linear mixed-effects model revealed significant differences between ratings among all conditions, with the pattern township < downed < mound. These results suggest that a sound’s phonological and morphological roles within a word affect how people perceive it. We evaluate this finding in light of the differing predictions made by phoneme-based theories, which incorporate phonemes as a fundamental unit, versus exemplar theories, which argue that phonological units are emergent.

Talker familiarity and the accommodation of talker variability.

A fundamental problem in speech perception is how (or whether) listeners accommodate variability in the way talkers produce speech. One view of the way listeners cope with this variability is that talker differences are normalized - a mapping between talker-specific characteristics and phonetic categories is computed such that speech is recognized in the context of the talker's vocal characteristics. Consistent with this view, listeners process speech more slowly when the talker changes randomly than when the talker remains constant. An alternative view is that speech perception is based on talker-specific auditory exemplars in memory clustered around linguistic categories that allow talker-independent perception. Consistent with this view, listeners become more efficient at talker-specific phonetic processing after voice identification training. We asked whether phonetic efficiency would increase with talker familiarity by testing listeners with extremely familiar talkers (family members), newly familiar talkers (based on laboratory training), and unfamiliar talkers. We also asked whether familiarity would reduce the need for normalization. As predicted, phonetic efficiency (word recognition in noise) increased with familiarity (unfamiliar < trained-on < family). However, we observed a constant processing cost for talker changes even for pairs of family members. We discuss how normalization and exemplar theories might account for these results, and constraints the results impose on theoretical accounts of phonetic constancy.

The future of dialects and the dialectology of the future

Abstract The days when dialectology was a quiet island in the (sometimes rough) ocean of modern linguistics seem to be over. Since the so-called social turn and the integration of quantitative methods into the study of urban as well as rural dialects, the barriers between early ‘Labovian’ sociolinguistics and dialectology have gradually been broken down. Of late, the study of dialect variation has become more and more an integral part of mainstream formal theory as ‘micro-variation’. Even more recently, constructivist approaches (such as Usage-based Phonology and Exemplar Theory for phonetics as well as ethnographic perspectives) are entering and enriching the field. Apart from these various developments, at least in the Old World, the object appears to be changing more and more rapidly, giving rise to the erosion of traditional dialect landscapes and the emergence of supra-local koinai as well as dialect/standard continua. This paper addresses some of the main aspects of these tendencies. We will discuss questions such as: how can the new types of language variety be studied; can dialectology be enriched with other than the traditional data and methods; how far-reaching is the innovative impact of the various disciplinary, inter-subdisciplinary and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisations?

Redução vocálica:

Este artigo tem por objetivo descrever o fenômeno de redução e apagamento da vogal alta posterior átona, em final de palavras, quando precedida de vogal alta anterior ou glide palatal, como, por exemplo, em tio [??i.?] ~ [??i?] e maio [?ma?? ?] ~ [?ma???]. Sugerimos que o que é tradicionalmente denominado cancelamento, perda ou apagamento vocálico, deve ser compreendido como o estágio final de reorganização segmental, em que um segmento inicialmente presente deixa de ocorrer. Sugerimos também que a reorganização segmental é gradiente e tem impacto na representação fonológica. A Teoria de Exemplares é o modelo teórico adotado neste trabalho. Argumentamos que embora a vogal alta posterior não seja audível em final de palavras, ela é caracterizada de maneira específica a partir do detalhe fonético decorrente da reorganização segmental. O detalhe fonético pode ser experimentalmente investigado e, neste artigo, a investigação foi realizada por análise acústica. Este artigo oferece evidências para a relevância de estudos experimentais em fonologia.

Assessing the frequency of general fingerprint patterns by fingerprint examiners and novices

The rarity of general fingerprint patterns should be taken into account in the assessment of fingerprint evidence to provide a more complete assessment of fingerprint evidence than when only considering the minutiae. This should be done because, the rarer the corresponding pattern, the stronger the support for the hypothesis that the fingermark stems from the same source as the reference fingerprint. Fingerprint examiners’ experience should enable them to provide meaningful assessments of the frequencies of these general patterns according to the theories of perceptual learning, exemplar theory of categorization and visual statistical learning. In this study we examined the accuracy of fingerprint examiners’ and novices’ judgments on the rarity of general fingerprint patterns.We found that fingerprint examiners seem to have acquired some knowledge about the rarity of general patterns, but had difficulty expressing this knowledge quantitatively using a novel sub-classification of general patterns. As a consequence, their judgments were not accurate and they did not perform better on this task than novices. For both participant groups judgments of more common patterns were more accurate. However, examiners did outperform novices in rank ordering general patterns from common to rare. We conclude that our study does not show that fingerprint examiners have expertise in explicitly judging frequencies of novel sub-classifications of general fingerprint patterns, but our results do indicate that the examiners have acquired knowledge about the rarity of patterns that novices do not possess.

Similarity, analogy and development in radical exemplar theory: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)

During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which generalisations are based on similarity to individual exemplars. However, to move our understanding forward, radical exemplar theory must include clearly specified mechanisms for analogy and similarity computation, and must account for changes in children’s generalisations across development.