Listener Expectations Research Articles

L1 listeners’ evaluations of LX speech: the role of listener expectations and personality traits

ABSTRACT LX speech tends to receive less favourable judgments, which can be attributed to its non-standard linguistic properties (e.g. foreign accents, grammatical errors). However, the evaluations of LX speech could also be affected by listeners’ expectations and their individual differences. This study extends research on the role of listeners’ expectations (cued by speech accent) and personality traits (Big Five), by examining the degree to which and how accent, grammaticality and listener personality interact to determine L1 listeners’ evaluations of LX speech. Sixty L1 English speakers (30 female) rated the acceptability of 40 English speech stimuli in a British or Polish accent; half of the stimuli were filled with English article errors. The listeners’ personality traits were self-reported via a short questionnaire of the Big Five factors. The significant interaction of accent, grammaticality and listener personality suggests that the occurrence of grammatical errors is less penalised in foreign-accented speech (vs. native-accented speech), unless the L1 listeners are highly conscientious or highly extraverted. The theoretical (expectation mismatch effect, Interpersonal Circumplex model), methodological (considering non-linear models and the moderation of contextual factors for personality effects) and potential practical implications (awareness training of personality effects) of the results are discussed.

Fast frequency modulation is encoded according to the listener expectations in the human subcortical auditory pathway

Abstract Expectations aid and bias our perception. For instance, expected words are easier to recognise than unexpected words, particularly in noisy environments, and incorrect expectations can make us misunderstand our conversational partner. Expectations are combined with the output from the sensory pathways to form representations of auditory objects in the cerebral cortex. Previous literature has shown that expectations propagate further down to subcortical stations during the encoding of static pure tones. However, it is unclear whether expectations also drive the subcortical encoding of subtle dynamic elements of the acoustic signal that are not represented in the tonotopic axis. Here, we tested the hypothesis that subjective expectations drive the encoding of fast frequency modulation (FM) in the human subcortical auditory pathway. We used fMRI to measure neural responses in the human auditory midbrain (inferior colliculus) and thalamus (medial geniculate body). Participants listened to sequences of FM-sweeps for which they held different expectations based on the task instructions. We found robust evidence that the responses in auditory midbrain and thalamus encode the difference between the acoustic input and the subjective expectations of the listener. The results indicate that FM-sweeps are already encoded at the level of the human auditory midbrain and that encoding is mainly driven by subjective expectations. We conclude that the subcortical auditory pathway is integrated in the cortical network of predictive processing and that expectations are used to optimise the encoding of fast dynamic elements of the acoustic signal.

Upaya Rri Padang Dalam Meningkatkan Pendengar Muda Melalui Pemanfaatan Media Sosial

Radio is a mass media that is closely related to the needs of society that can provide various kinds of information, entertainment, and education. The presence of the internet has shifted people's behavior patterns that are more following the development of internet technology, including RRI Padang. RRI Padang strives to improve the quality of broadcast programs in order to attract young listeners, especially on social media. The background of this study aims to find out how RRI Padang's efforts are made in increasing young listeners through the use of social media. This research using qualitative-inductive research is a research method that starts with collecting concrete data and then developing patterns, themes, or general theories from the data. This method of radio with a focus on attracting the younger generation can involve several approaches oriented towards a deep understanding of the preferences, needs, and expectations of young listeners. This research is with data collection techniques in the form of interviews, observations, documentation, and document studies. The result of this study is the success of RRI Padang's efforts in increasing young listeners through the use of social media

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

In three artificial language experiments, we explored the rate at which adults learned associations between linguistic variation and speaker characteristics. Within each of the experiments, we observed that listeners sociolinguistic learning occurred, regardless of whether the speaker characteristic is social (race and sex/gender) or nonsocial (hat wearing), or whether they heard a phonological or morphological variant. However, we found that listener's initial expectations of what social properties were predictive of linguistic variation differed, impacting overall performance. First, participants were much more likely to assume that a phonological variant was predicted by a social property than a nonsocial property (Experiment 1). Most interestingly, participants were more likely to privilege speaker race than sex/gender, but only in the case of a phonological variant (Experiments 2 and 3). The same effect was found in both White and Black participants, though White participants were more likely to correctly articulate which speaker characteristic explained the variation, suggesting that sociolinguistic learning hinges on real-world experiences with language and social diversity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Host Qualities: Conceptualising Listeners’ Expectations for Podcast Hosts

ABSTRACT This article empirically identifies and conceptualises listener expectations of podcast hosts based on a general and open research question concerning which expectations podcast listeners have for podcast hosts. From an explorative empirical study of 20 online focus group interviews with Danish radio- and podcast listeners, the article concludes that the expectations of podcast hosts are grouped into three categories: knowledge, storytelling, and parasocial relationship. The three categories have underlying themes: some are distinct expectations for podcast hosts; others are of a more general character. Additionally, the study contributes to a better understanding of the inherent qualities of podcasts as a medium and provides useful knowledge for podcast producers about user preferences.

Defining “happy” in happy birthday: Singing accuracy a construct based on range and intervals

Singing in tune, or singing accuracy, is a construct dependent on genre, key selection, singers’ ranges, and listener expectations. But across genres, singers are expected to sing in tune with themselves and with others. Because singing a familiar song may be the most common communal singing situation in the lives of non-professional singers and students, we chose to examine previously reported data on the Happy Birthday song as representative of one typical example of a popular song globally and used in previous research. The participants were adult non-professional singers. We designed a predictive model of performance on the large ascending octave based on initial interval performance, providing implications for music education in children or adults and by exploring variables such as range, voice register, and key modulation. We conclude that while initial performance may predict subsequent performance, features such as singer’s range and starting pitch may also account for variability in individual performance.

Innuendo in Music as an Active Perception Factor

Relevance of the study. A problem, discussed in the article is listener's co-activity in the process of perception music. Communicative aspects of art were deeply and variously studied in many musicologists' works. But item of listener's co-participation in phenomena of tension between potential, most probable way of composer's thought (from one side) and the real sounding of musical composition (from another side) is not completely explored. Phenomena of music is considered as a dialogue among composition and listener's consciousness, in spite of traditional view to music as a composer's monologue only.
 Main objective is to reveal the communicative and aesthetic potential of innuendo in music. One of the most significant expedients in this sphere of thinking is innuendo. In the context of recent paper this notion is treated as absence of the most waited music material as a specific mean, which causes more sharp and strong perception of tide of sounds.
 Methodology. Methods of this study are: conditional comparative analysis of a music compositions' set; modeling of listener's expectations from music; reconstruction of composers' design, using the author’s experience of composing. These methods were explored in the modeling of listener’s perception of the several music compositions of different styles.
 The results and conclusions. Contemporary academic concert music, as a rule, means a division to active music makers (e.g. composer, improviser, performer) and passive listener. However, even in art styles the vivid link between piece of music and public contains hidden interactivity of listener. It may be a relict of co-participation in music performance in the folk and church traditions. There is no real interactivity in art genres because of listener's impossibility to intervene into real sounding structures. But in the context of certain style advanced listener has an opportunity to feel the difference between most probable and real composer's variants of continuation. Listener is presented as a reconstructor of composer's ideas, of course, in cause of his knowledge of present style.
 Such expectations of listener belong to functionality in music. Innuendo is effect of pseudodeconstruction, based on the functional expectations system. There are such types of music innuendo as: 1) vertical (absence of expected texture component); 2) horizontal (absence of expected continuation); 3) active (by disruption of expected continuation); 4) passive (absence without disruption); 5) provocative (incompleteness as an occasion to maintain more complete version of present theme).
 Absence as a kind of Presence (Heidegger) is an ontological basis of innuendo effect, because it is replaced full Presence as real in the place of expected. Thereby reality of this fragment isn't absolute but one from set of possibilities. Dialogue between "Listener's Variant" and "Composers variant" is a realization of ontological time's potential, which contains more than one option in future.

Linguistic profiling and shifting standards

Perceptions of non-native speech are often guided by listeners’ expectations of a speaker. These expectations are informed by pre-existing beliefs about how particular types of people sound. Perceived ethnicity can affect how listeners evaluate speech (Rubin 1992; D’Onofrio 2019); however, most of this work has been situated in Western contexts. The current study details an experiment that tests for the linguistic profiling (Baugh 2005) of the Uyghur population of China, a group that has been systematically oppressed for their ethnicity and religion. Using name-based ethnicity priming, participants thought they were hearing either a Korean, Uyghur or non-descript speaker of L2 Mandarin. Results showed that participants rated the speaker as significantly more confident, intelligent and hard-working in the Uyghur condition. However, participants were significantly less likely to hire the supposedly ‘Uyghur’ speaker. We propose that these results are evidence of shifting standards (Biernat 2012), whereby listener expectations are lowered by social stereotypes, leading to inflated subjective ratings of minority groups, without leading to positive outcomes.

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

Heritability of Sound Processing Deficits in Autism: Neural Insights

Heritability of Sound Processing Deficits in Autism: Neural Insights

인식론적 관점에서 바라본 문말조사 ‘了’

From a grammatical perspective, the Sentence-final Particle '了' originated from the verb 'liao(了)', which has Temporality. However, It has been grammaticalized since the mid-late period of the Southern Song Dynasty. In addition, through the absorption of the function of 'ye(也)', it develops into a mirativity marker that is involved in the recognition of the speaker and the listener. This function has been passed down to modern Chinese, and the Sentence-Final Particle 'liao' still functions as an mirativity marker, and its meaning is distinguished as (1) new information to the speaker and the listener, and (2) contrary things to the speaker and listener's expectations. This mirativity of 'liao' is implemented in two ways as follows. First, it is compatible with the negative. Previously, the Sentence-Final Particle 'liao' was considered a particle in the tense-aspect category, so an explanation of the phenomenon of a negative and '了' co-occurring within a sentence was required. However, 'liao' in the epistemological category can be the subject of recognition, whether the proposition is positive or negative, so no problem occurs unless there is a problem in the context of discourse. Second, it is not constrained by a tense-aspect. ‘The 'mirality' of 'liao' allows for events that correspond to the ’past perfective aspect’ and the ‘future perfective aspect’, as well as events that correspond to the ’stative setense’ and even the progressive event corresponding to the ‘imperfective aspect’.

Investigating the interactional significance of the use of well by a child with ASD during writing interactions

Background: Understanding the strategies children use to negotiate interactional breakdowns is important, as it can help clinicians to recognize, orient, and mediate the breakdowns collaboratively with the child, in order to re-establish intersubjectivity. In previous clinical and research contexts, one participant we observed evidenced many behaviors initially coded as ‘avoidance’ or ‘failure to maintain topic’ or as problematic in some way. These behaviors often contained specific linguistic devices (e.g., ‘hmmm,’ ‘bu:t,’ and ‘well’). The functions of well as a discourse marker have been documented extensively by conversation analysts in neurotypical populations (e.g., Heritage, 2015; Kovarsky, 1990; Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff and Lerner, 2009; Schiffrin, 1987). This study employs principles of conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the function of well in the clinical contexts observed. Method: Interactional analysis, a hybrid approach to CA, was employed to investigate one child’s use of well in writing interactions. Data were collected over the course of one semester. Three sessions were chosen for analysis, transcribed, and analyzed for instances of well. Each occurrence was analyzed and coded individually. Thematic analysis followed, in order to arrive at an overall understanding of how the participant employed well interactionally. Results: Well in turn-initial places occurred 40 times across the three sessions. These instances could be organized into four different themes of use: issue with question posed; response may not meet listener expectations; difficulty formulating response; and loss of intersubjectivity. Discussion/conclusion: This analysis highlights how the participant’s use of well in the interactions analyzed was meaningful. Turns prefaced by well signaled breakdowns in intersubjectivity, a need for conversational support, disagreement, issues with the previous speaker’s turn, or a warning/acknowledgement that the response might be different than the listener’s expectation. Clinical and research implications are explored.

Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa

Reviewed by: Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa Marty Regan (bio) Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa. Kokoro Records, KKR-010 (2016): One CD-ROM (64 minutes). US $27. Released in 2016 in collaboration with shamisen1 performer Tetsuya Nozawa, this compact disc is composer Colleen Schmuckal's first. It features five works for shamisen in combination with various traditional Japanese instruments and voice. Colleen Schmuckal graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2008 with a bachelor of music in composition and bassoon performance and first began her shamisen studies under the auspices of a Monbukagakusho grant from the Japanese embassy in Chicago in 2009. In 2013 she received her master's in teacher education from Yokohama National University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in musicology at Tokyo National University of the Arts, focusing on developing new analytical methods and compositional techniques for traditional Japanese music and musical instruments. She currently works as a lecturer at Tokyo National University of the Arts and Rikkyo University and is a member of the Hōgaku Composers Alliance 2010,2 an organization dedicated to supporting new music for traditional Japanese instruments. Her works are frequently performed at new music concerts in Tokyo. All works on this compact disc feature shamisen performer Tetsuya Nozawa.3 Nozawa began his studies of the shamisen in 1997 with Akiko Nishigata and graduated from the Institute for Contemporary-Traditional Japanese Music, affiliated with Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, where he currently teaches. He has won a number of awards, including first prize at the Tokyo Traditional Music Competition in 2005. A strong proponent of new music for shamisen, to date Nozawa has commissioned and recorded more than 150 new works from up-and-coming composers on 15 compact discs. Scored for solo shamisen, The Ethereal Wind Dance (2012) was awarded second prize in the prestigious sixth Makino Yutaka Composition Competition. As Schmuckal writes in the liner notes, "The wind is linked to a shapeshifting crow from Japanese folklore, the tengu. The invisible wind takes a form we cannot grasp or define. At times it murmurs, dances playfully, rages, and curls around warmly. While both violent and calming, wind's shape is as [End Page 160] unfathomable as a tengu still dwelling somewhere within an untouched forest. No matter how much the world modernizes around us, it's possible that deep within the forest the tengu is still dancing with the wind" (liner notes, 2). The first movement, "Untouched Forest," is pensive and mysterious throughout. The pitch collection for this movement is unexpectedly bright for the shamisen, utilizing a traditional gagaku4 tuning known as sōjō, which represents spring in gagaku music theory. A single pitch repeats methodically and functions like a melodic drone, from which various composite melodies slowly emerge. The movement ends quietly and introspectively. The work becomes more playful and rhythmically animated in the second movement, titled "Tengu Step." This movement highlights a number of idiomatic shamisen techniques, including left-hand pizzicato, portamento, and reverse arpeggio. The third movement, "Clouds Float By," plays with the listener's expectations. Several times there is a sudden increase in tempo as well as rhythmic and dynamic intensity, only to be quickly thwarted. This helps prepare the listener for the highlight of the entire work: the fourth movement, titled "After the Storm." This movement features an array of compositional gestures, motives, and virtuosic techniques that dazzle the listener with their sheer intensity and technical prowess, although at times the performance comes across as somewhat mechanical. In the final coda, there is a reprise of playful motives encountered in "Tengu Step," rounding off the entire work. Scored for two shamisen, in Terra's Mirror: The Spirituality of Celestial Being (2013), the two instrumentalists "embody the scientific and romantic relationship between the earth and moon" (liner notes, 3). The title is based on a selection from "The Spirituality of Celestial Bodies," written by the composer's younger sister Diana Schmuckal. Characterized by jagged, agitated, and unpredictable rhythms, the two shamisen twist and turn around each other in a web of thick, relentless contrapuntal activity. A more relaxed middle section characterized by space, economy...

Baseline pupil size encodes task-related information and modulates the task-evoked response in a speech-in-noise task.

Pupillometry data are commonly reported relative to a baseline value recorded in a controlled pre-task condition. In this study, the influence of the experimental design and the preparatory processing related to task difficulty on the baseline pupil size was investigated during a speech intelligibility in noise paradigm. Furthermore, the relationship between the baseline pupil size and the temporal dynamics of the pupil response was assessed. The analysis revealed strong effects of block presentation order, within-block sentence order and task difficulty on the baseline values. An interaction between signal-to-noise ratio and block order was found, indicating that baseline values reflect listener expectations arising from the order in which the different blocks were presented. Furthermore, the baseline pupil size was found to affect the slope, delay and curvature of the pupillary response as well as the peak pupil dilation. This suggests that baseline correction might be sufficient when reporting pupillometry results in terms of mean pupil dilation only, but not when a more complex characterization of the temporal dynamics of the response is considered. By clarifying which factors affect baseline pupil size and how baseline values interact with the task-evoked response, the results from the present study can contribute to a better interpretation of the pupillary response as a marker of cognitive processing.

The Effects of Uncertainty in Level on Speech-on-Speech Masking.

Identification of speech from a "target" talker was measured in a speech-on-speech masking task with two simultaneous "masker" talkers. The overall level of each talker was either fixed or randomized throughout each stimulus presentation to investigate the effectiveness of level as a cue for segregating competing talkers and attending to the target. Experimental manipulations included varying the level difference between talkers and imposing three types of target level uncertainty: 1) fixed target level across trials, 2) random target level across trials, or 3) random target levels on a word-by-word basis within a trial. When the target level was predictable performance was better than corresponding conditions when the target level was uncertain. Masker confusions were consistent with a high degree of informational masking (IM). Furthermore, evidence was found for "tuning" in level and a level "release" from IM. These findings suggest that conforming to listener expectation about relative level, in addition to cues signaling talker identity, facilitates segregation of, and maintaining focus of attention on, a specific talker in multiple-talker communication situations.

Listener expectations and the perceptual accommodation of talker variability: A pre-registered replication.

Researchers have hypothesized that in order to accommodate variability in how talkers produce their speech sounds, listeners must perform a process of talker normalization. Consistent with this proposal, several studies have shown that spoken word recognition is slowed when speech is produced by multiple talkers compared with when all speech is produced by one talker (a multitalker processing cost). Nusbaum and colleagues have argued that talker normalization is modulated by attention (e.g., Nusbaum & Morin, 1992, Speech Perception, Production and Linguistic Structure, pp. 113–134). Some of the strongest evidence for this claim is from a speeded monitoring study where a group of participants who expected to hear two talkers showed a multitalker processing cost, but a separate group who expected one talker did not (Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33[2], 391–409). In that study, however, the sample size was small and the crucial interaction was not significant. In this registered report, we present the results of a well-powered attempt to replicate those findings. In contrast to the previous study, we did not observe multitalker processing costs in either of our groups. To rule out the possibility that the null result was due to task constraints, we conducted a second experiment using a speeded classification task. As in Experiment 1, we found no influence of expectations on talker normalization, with no multitalker processing cost observed in either group. Our data suggest that the previous findings of Magnuson and Nusbaum (2007) be regarded with skepticism and that talker normalization may not be permeable to high-level expectations.

Aesthetic Judgments of Live and Recorded Music: Effects of Congruence Between Musical Artist and Piece.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the live music industry to an abrupt halt; subsequently, musicians are looking for ways to replicate the live concert experience virtually. The present study sought to investigate differences in aesthetic judgments of a live concert vs. a recorded concert, and whether these responses vary based on congruence between musical artist and piece. Participants (N = 32) made continuous ratings of their felt pleasure either during a live concert or while viewing an audiovisual recorded version of the same joint concert given by a university band and a United States Army band. Each band played two pieces: a United States patriotic piece (congruent with the army band) and a non-patriotic piece (congruent with the university band). Results indicate that, on average, participants reported more pleasure while listening to pieces that were congruent, which did not vary based on live vs. lab listening context: listeners preferred patriotic music when played by the army band and non-patriotic music when played by the university band. Overall, these results indicate that felt pleasure in response to music may vary based on listener expectations of the musical artist, such that listeners prefer musical pieces that “fit” with the particular artist. When considering implications for concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic, our results indicate that listeners may experience similar degrees of pleasure even while viewing a recorded concert, suggesting that virtual concerts are a reasonable way to elicit pleasure from audiences when live performances are not possible.

Kako učiniti muzikologiju dostupnijom uz pomoć radija?

This article presents the Croatian Music Alphabetarium of Croatian Radio, one of the numerous music broadcasts of Croatian Radio's Third Program (HR3), the only specialized publicradio station for culture in Croatia, as a case study of a (seemingly successful) attempt to make scholarly musicological texts (in the form of radio speech) more accessible. The results of Croatian radio market research published in 2015 speak in favour of the possibility of making scientific musicological texts more accessible to the general public with the help of radio. These results were compared and supplemented with the results of the German survey from 2006, which clarify the expectations of German classical music listeners, and thus helps us understand the Croatian classical music listeners' expectations, which have not been researched in our country so far. The Croatian research also reveals that Croatian listeners are willing to listen to a speech for up to half an hour if they arc interested in the topic, what encourages us to present and argue for the publication of scholarly musicological texts on the radio. Furthermore, the Croatian research reveals that our case study broadcast deals with two out of the fourteen most interesting topics for the Croatian listeners - cultural heritage and contemporary culture. The Croatian musicologists who studied musicology and music journalism are well media educated, and thus willing to publish their texts not only in professional and scientific journals but also on HR3. In order for that to happen the HR3 editors, who are accomplished musicologists and journalists, have to demonstrate their willingness as well as their superiors to broadcast scholarly musicological texts. Since the foundation of the Croatian Radio Third program (in 1964) and the Department of Musicology in Zagreb (in 1970), named Department of Musicology and Music Journalism in the period between 1977 and 1994, these conditions had been met until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that period (1964-2020) HR3 regularly broadcasted scholarly musicological texts, and in the last eight years IIR3 has produced as many as two weekly broadcasts and two monthly broadcasts with scholarly musicological texts. The pandemic has given rise to the negative trend of reducing speech in classical music broadcasts, but hopefully not for long. © 2021 Croatian Musicological Society. All rights reserved.

Promoting Cultural and Linguistic Competence in Speech Science Courses

Purpose Speech conveys information about a speaker's identity—their age, gender, size, health, region of origin, language learning background, sexual orientation, and race—through a variety of acoustic cues. This review of the production and perception of extralinguistic information about speaker identity is intended to help instructors promote cultural and linguistic competence in basic anatomy and physiology, phonetics, and speech science courses through the understanding of indexical information in speech. Conclusions In assisting our students to recognize the anatomical/physiological and learned social and cultural speech features associated with the expression of personal identity, basic science instructors contribute to heightened awareness of listener expectations, stereotypes, and prejudices by future speech-language pathologists and audiologists so that they are better equipped to avoid misdiagnosis of speech differences and disorders, under referral or over referral of clients from vulnerable populations, and discriminatory practices leading to health disparities in clinical services and research.

Narrative characteristics of autobiographical memory predict expectations of narrator gender

ABSTRACT Gender differences in autobiographical memory have been documented in various domains. The current study attempts to sharpen an understanding of extant gender differences in autobiographical memory by considering listener expectations, contributing to a sociocultural model. Across three studies (a pilot and two separate data collections) a narrative database was created. Narratives were coded for variables that have been shown to differ by gender, including emotion, connectedness to others, factual and interpretive elaboration, and thematic coherence. Participants read narratives and assessed if the narrator was male or female, indicating their confidence. In the pilot study and study 1, narrative features consistently predicted participant’s assessments of narrator gender in two separate methods using the same narratives. In study 2, new narratives were used, showing replicability of the method and avoiding potential confounds of naturally occurring differences in study 1 and pilot data. More emotion words predicted higher likelihood of assessing a female narrator. Results support the use of such a methodology as an innovative way to examine gender-based listener expectations in autobiographical memory. They can be used for further theorising about the source of gender differences in this domain of memory that represents a combination of cognitive and social processes.