Perception Of Consonants Research Articles

Effects of the Configuration of Hearing Loss on Consonant Perception between Simulated Bimodal and Electric Acoustic Stimulation Hearing.

Cochlear implant technology allows for acoustic and electric stimulations to be combined across ears (bimodal) and within the same ear (electric acoustic stimulation [EAS]). Mechanisms used to integrate speech acoustics may be different between the bimodal and EAS hearing, and the configurations of hearing loss might be an important factor for the integration. Thus, differentiating the effects of different configurations of hearing loss on bimodal or EAS benefit in speech perception (differences in performance with combined acoustic and electric stimulations from a better stimulation alone) is important. Using acoustic simulation, we determined how consonant recognition was affected by different configurations of hearing loss in bimodal and EAS hearing. A mixed design was used with one between-subject variable (simulated bimodal group vs. simulated EAS group) and one within-subject variable (acoustic stimulation alone, electric stimulation alone, and combined acoustic and electric stimulations). Twenty adult subjects (10 for each group) with normal hearing were recruited. Consonant perception was unilaterally or bilaterally measured in quiet. For the acoustic stimulation, four different simulations of hearing loss were created by band-pass filtering consonants with a fixed lower cutoff frequency of 100 Hz and each of the four upper cutoff frequencies of 250, 500, 750, and 1,000 Hz. For the electric stimulation, an eight-channel noise vocoder was used to generate a typical spectral mismatch by using fixed input (200-7,000 Hz) and output (1,000-7,000 Hz) frequency ranges. The effects of simulated hearing loss on consonant recognition were compared between the two groups. Significant bimodal and EAS benefits occurred regardless of the configurations of hearing loss and hearing technology (bimodal vs. EAS). Place information was better transmitted in EAS hearing than in bimodal hearing. These results suggest that configurations of hearing loss are not a significant factor for integrating consonant information between acoustic and electric stimulations. The results also suggest that mechanisms used to integrate consonant information may be similar between bimodal and EAS hearing.

Validation of the Iowa Test of Consonant Perception.

Speech perception (especially in background noise) is a critical problem for hearing-impaired listeners and an important issue for cognitive hearing science. Despite a plethora of standardized measures, few single-word closed-set tests uniformly sample the most frequently used phonemes and use response choices that equally sample phonetic features like place and voicing. The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception (ITCP) attempts to solve this. It is a proportionally balanced phonemic word recognition task designed to assess perception of the initial consonant of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. The ITCP consists of 120 sampled CVC words. Words were recorded from four different talkers (two female) and uniformly sampled from all four quadrants of the vowel space to control for coarticulation. Response choices on each trial are balanced to equate difficulty and sample a single phonetic feature. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of ITCP by examining reliability (test-retest) and validity in a sample of online normal-hearing participants. Ninety-eight participants completed two sessions of the ITCP along with standardized tests of words and sentence in noise (CNC words and AzBio sentences). The ITCP showed good test-retest reliability and convergent validity with two popular tests presented in noise. All the materials to use the ITCP or to construct your own version of the ITCP are freely available [Geller, McMurray, Holmes, and Choi (2020). https://osf.io/hycdu/].

Native English speakers and Hindi consonants: From cross‐language perception patterns to pronunciation teaching

AbstractThe Hindi consonant inventory, which includes the cross‐linguistically rare retroflex place of articulation and four‐way laryngeal contrasts, is known to pose difficulties for native English speakers. Hindi language textbooks address this challenge, in part, by providing various articulatory and acoustic descriptions of Hindi consonants, typically referencing their similarity to and differences from English consonants. Here, we investigate the perception of 20 Hindi consonants by native English speakers with no prior Hindi language experience. We conducted two consonant perception studies: one in which participants identified Hindi consonants with English consonant labels, and one in which they determined whether pairs of Hindi consonants were the same or different. In this way, we were able to identify the consonants—and contrasts—that may pose the greatest difficulty for learners, and also to make recommendations regarding the articulatory and acoustic description of Hindi consonants for English‐speaking learners.

Calibration of Consonant Perception to Room Reverberation.

Purpose We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the manipulations in the acoustic context of the carrier. Method Two experiments were performed, each with nine participants. Targets consisted of 10 or 16 vowel-consonant (VC) syllables presented in one of two strongly reverberant rooms, preceded by a multiple-VC carrier presented in either the same room, a different reverberant room, or an anechoic room. In Experiment 1, the carrier length and the target room randomly varied from trial to trial, whereas in Experiment 2, they were fixed within a block of trials. Results Overall, a consistent carrier provided an advantage for consonant perception compared to inconsistent carriers, whether in anechoic or differently reverberant rooms. Phonetic analysis showed that carrier inconsistency significantly degraded identification of the manner of articulation, especially for stop consonants and, in one of the rooms, also of voicing. Carrier length and carrier/target uncertainty did not affect adaptation to reverberation for individual phonetic features. The detrimental effects of anechoic and different reverberant carriers on target perception were similar. Conclusions The strength of calibration varies across different phonetic features, as well as across rooms with different levels of reverberation. Even though place of articulation is the feature that is affected by reverberation the most, it is the manner of articulation and, partially, voicing for which room adaptation is observed.

Challenges in the perception of L2 English phonemes by native speakers of Cypriot Greek

Research into non-native speech perception performance suggests that adults encounter difficulties discriminating segmental distinctions that are not used contrastively in their first language. Current theoretical models suggest that these difficulties are related to the acquisition of a native speech system but diverge in whether the perceptual mechanisms operate on acoustic or articulatory information. The present research addresses: (1) the difficulties Cypriot Greek (CGR) listeners of L2 English encounter with English vowels and consonants, and (2) the effect of extra-linguistic (i.e. age, gender, years of learning L2 English, educational setting, age of onset, reported use in the L2, visits to English-speaking countries) and linguistic factors (word frequency, word length, syllable number) on the perception of vowels and consonants in L2 English. A task involving two discrimination tests assessed native CGR listeners’ perception of English contrasts for vowels and consonants. Overall, listeners performed slightly better when dealing with consonants compared to vowels, significant effects have been reported. Concerning the examined factors, age, gender, years of L2 instruction, and years of experience have been reported to have significant effects, especially on speech perception of consonants. Specifically, the findings suggest that acoustic cues such as voicing and vowel length, which are relevant for native speakers of English, may not be for non-native speakers, in this case for CGR L1 speakers.

Production and Perception of Geminate Consonants in English Words by Thai Learners of English: Implications for English Teaching and Learning

The present study aims to explore the production and perception of geminate consonants of Thai learners of English. This study seeks to answer three research questions. First, are there any significant differences in the production of different types of English geminate consonants among five groups of participants (four groups of non-native speakers of English and one group of native speakers of English)? Second, does the level of English proficiency of the English learners affect the production and perception of English geminate consonants? Third, do English orthographic forms affect the pronunciation of Thai learners of English? To answer these three questions, the researcher compared the performance of 90 students from three different levels of language proficiency (low intermediate, high intermediate, and advanced) and of 15 Thai university instructors with the performance of eight native speakers of English. The researcher examined the performance of the participants by using two tasks: reading aloud and dictation. Even though the statistical results showed a significant difference only in the production of lexical geminates between native and non-native English speakers, it should be noted that the students from the lower levels of language proficiency seemed to have greater difficulty in identifying English geminates in regular speech. Ultimately, the researcher would like to argue that teaching pronunciation is not just about teaching students how to produce the correct sounds. It is also about helping them to hear the sounds correctly, so that they can understand what they hear.

Vowel Context Effect on the Perception of Stop Consonants in Malayalam and Its Role in Determining Syllable Frequency.

Background and ObjectivesThe study investigated vowel context effects on the perception of stop consonants in Malayalam. It also probed into the role of vowel context effects in determining the frequency of occurrence of various consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in Malayalam.Subjects and MethodsThe study used a cross-sectional pre-experimental post-test only research design on 30 individuals with normal hearing, who were native speakers of Malayalam. The stimuli included three stop consonants, each spoken in three different vowel contexts. The resultant nine syllables were presented in original form and five gating conditions. The consonant recognition in different vowel contexts of the participants was assessed. The frequency of occurrence of the nine target syllables in the spoken corpus of Malayalam was also systematically derived.ResultsThe consonant recognition score was better in the /u/ vowel context compared with /i/ and /a/ contexts. The frequency of occurrence of the target syllables derived from the spoken corpus of Malayalam showed that the three stop consonants occurred more frequently with the vowel /a/ compared with /u/ and /i/.ConclusionsThe findings show a definite vowel context effect on the perception of the Malayalam stop consonants. This context effect observed is different from that in other languages. Stop consonants are perceived better in the context of /u/ compared with the /a/ and /i/ contexts. Furthermore, the vowel context effects do not appear to determine the frequency of occurrence of different CV syllables in Malayalam.

Development of Phoneme Perception Test for School-Aged Children

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to develop lists of phoneme perception tests for school-aged children.Methods: The 127 initial and 94 final consonant test items were modified by the difficulty level (reduced the number for the multiple-choice and controlled familiarity of target words and foil words). The validity of the results for normal hearing children was evaluated. Through discussions by experts in various fields, the target word list was revised. Words with a low percentage (<90%) of correct answers, vowel-consonant in an initial consonant test item, and consonant-vowel (CV) in final consonant item were eliminated and produced the last revised consonant perception test item for school-aged children.Results: The consonant test item consisted of three multiple-choice words type of consonant-vowel-consonant or CV. The 50 initial and 25 final consonant perception test items included the high degree of familiarity, corresponding frequency of phonemes for daily life speech sounds of children.Conclusion: To analyze the phoneme perception ability of school-age children by listening and to evaluate phoneme errors in children with congenital high frequency hearing loss, the results of this study are useful.

Visual Benefit in Lexical Tone Perception in Mandarin: An Event-related Potential Study

Congruent visual information enhances auditory speech perception. This visual benefit has been widely observed in perception of consonants and vowels, and linked to reduced amplitudes and latencies of auditory N1 and P2 event-related potential (ERP) components when visual information was present. However, it remains unclear whether lexical tone perception in Mandarin also shows this visual benefit. This question is theoretically important given the low visual saliency of lexical tones. The current study compared the N1/P2 reduction in Mandarin lexical tones and consonants perception with a discrimination task. Result showed amplitude reductions in N1/P2 and a latency reduction in N1 for audiovisual lexical tone perception. These findings suggest that lexical tone perception was also helped by visual information as found in consonants. Furthermore, this visual benefit in N1 for lexical tone perception was delayed relative to consonants.

The Development of a Paediatric Phoneme Discrimination Test for Arabic Phonemic Contrasts.

Objective: The aim of this project was to develop the Arabic CAPT (A-CAPT), a Standard Arabic version of the CHEAR auditory perception test (CAPT) that assesses consonant perception ability in children. Method: This closed-set test was evaluated with normal-hearing children aged 5 to 11 years. Development and validation of the speech materials were accomplished in two experimental phases. Twenty-six children participated in phase I, where the test materials were piloted to ensure that the selected words were age appropriate and that the form of Arabic used was familiar to the children. Sixteen children participated in phase II where test–retest reliability, age effects, and critical differences were measured. A computerized implementation was used to present stimuli and collect responses. Children selected one of four response options displayed on a screen for each trial. Results: Two lists of 32 words were developed with two levels of difficulty, easy and hard. Assessment of test–retest reliability for the final version of the lists showed a strong agreement. A within-subject ANOVA showed no significant difference between test and retest sessions. Performance improved with increasing age. Critical difference values were similar to the British English version of the CAPT. Conclusions: The A-CAPT is an appropriate speech perception test for assessing Arabic-speaking children as young as 5 years old. This test can reliably assess consonant perception ability and monitor changes over time or after an intervention.

The development of consonant perception in pediatric cochlear implants of 1－3 years old

Objective:To explore the development of consonant perception in early implanted pediatric with prelingual bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss at 1 to 3 years of age. Methods:A retrospective study was conducted to prospectively analyze the pediatric with hearing impaired who had cochlear implantation. According to the age of implantation, all participants were divided into two groups as 1 year old group（1－<2） and 2 years old group（2－<3）. It was compared the consonant perception of Mandarin early speech perception test scores at 1, 2, 3 years after implantation as well as the trends in consonant perception between 1 year old group and normal hearing pediatrics of the same age. Results:①The scores improved notably in two groups with the increase of physiological age（P=0.038, P=0.012）; ②The consonant perception of 1 year old group was significantly better than that of 2 years old group（P<0.05）, however, there are great difference between 1 year old group and normal hearing pediatrics of the same age. Conclusion:With the increase of physiological age, the consonant perception will be improved correspondingly within 3 years of pediatric cochlear implants under the age of 3 however there are differences with normal hearing pediatrics of the same age; the earlier the age of implant, the better the consonant perception is.

A critical look at commonly used stimuli in speech perception experiments

Speech is an attractive stimulus to use for testing the auditory system because it is both highly relevant to everyday life and also replete with acoustic complexity that can test a variety of auditory skills. This presentation shines a light on some commonly used test stimuli or stimulus practices and raises questions about their use, or the interpretations of previous results. For example, the vowel acoustic data published by Hillenbrand et al. (1995) has been adopted as a de facto gold standard even though it was intended as a snapshot of a single dialect at a particular point in time. In that paper, the dynamics of vowel spectra were emphasized, though this aspect of vowels has been often overlooked. In consonant testing, the use of the /a/ context is pervasive, and yet this consonant environment is far from “neutral,” especially in situations where perception of voicing/voice onset time is measured. Perception of consonants and words will be examined with regard to their generalization to perception of longer utterances. Finally, we will examine the balance between convenience and generalizability, including strengths and weaknesses of closed-set speech stimuli.

Evaluating speech enhancement for cochlear implants using a web application

People who suffer from hearing loss struggle to maintain social relationships, which diminishes their quality of life. As technology progresses, video calls are an increasingly common way of communicating with family and friends. This trend has been accelerated by the rapid rise of software for video conferencing to support communication during the past year of pandemic restrictions. Consequently, using the same media devices that are used for video calls is an ecologically valid way of assessing hearing. This presentation describes a web application for conducting remote hearing assessments on any media device. The features of the web application will be introduced, and research results will be presented from a study of speech enhancement for cochlear implants. Consonant perception is innately challenging for listeners with hearing loss and transmission of speech over communication channels further deteriorates the acoustics of consonants. We hypothesized that consonant enhancement at the source would improve identification. The results indicate that transient emphasis does improve consonant identification for cochlear implant users while preserving their vowel identification accuracy. Discussion will consider general use of hearing assessments using media devices that people use in their daily lives.

Perception experiments to try on your friends

This talk presents hands-on activities to give intermediate students experience conducting phonological perception experiments and deepen their grasp of categorical consonant perception. It focuses on two assignments in which students gather categorical perception responses from friends, graph them to reveal crossover points, form hypotheses about contributing cues, and apply Praat measurement skills to test them. In the first, students and naïve friends respond to online phoneme identification and discrimination tasks involving a synthesized /ba-da-ga/ continuum varying only in formant transitions. They tally and graph the pooled responses, identify crossover points, and answer interpretation questions. In the second task, students and friends identify words on a bad-bat continuum varying only in vowel length. They hypothesize which phonetic features might distinguish the words, then measure them in Praat to discover that vowel length cues final consonant voicing, not voice onset time as learned in previous lessons. These activities have been used successfully in an advanced introduction to speech science for speech-language pathology undergraduates with an introductory English phonetics prerequisite. They form many students’ first experience conducting experiments, and the hypothesis, deduction, and interpretation portions stretch their critical thinking skills.

Phonological Process in Toddlers’’ Single-Word Production: An Explorative Study of Alveolar Sounds in English

The production of phonological patterns is a very complicated process especially when alveolar consonant sounds are pronounced in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The toddlers ageing 2-3 years as well as the language handicaps find it more complicated to cope with this sound process. The present study on toddlers aims at investigating the alveolar consonant sounds in keeping with single word production. The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception by Jason Geller was implemented to investigate sound productions in the perspective of Substitution Process proposed by Burnthal and Rankson (2004). Non-probabilistic Sample of twenty-five toddlers was given 125 words; a five-word set to every toddler to pronounce repeating at least five times at the top of his voice the articulators at length. Data was collected by means of informants’ close observations. The comparison between the pronunciation of original words and that of produced words with their phonetic transcription provided evidence of the shift in alveolar sound patterns during the phonological process by the toddlers. The results implicated that the toddlers made good use of articulators with ease and without any special training. They simplified the complicated consonant sound patterns at their own convenience. The study will be equally beneficial for speech pathologists, linguistic scholars, and keen phonology learners.

The Need for Composite Models of Music Perception

In the article “Consonance preferences within an unconventional tuning system,” Friedman and colleagues (2021) examine consonance ratings of a large range of dyads and triads from the Bohlen-Pierce chromatic just (BPCJ) scale. The study is designed as a replication of a recent paper by Bowling, Purves, and Gill (2018), which proposes that perception of consonance in dyads, triads, and tetrads can be predicted by their harmonic similarity to human vocalisations.In this commentary, we would like to correct some interpretations regarding Friedman et al.’s (2021) discussion of our paper (Smit, Milne, Dean, &amp; Weidemann, 2019), as well as express some concerns regarding the statistical methods used. We also propose a stronger emphasis on the use of, as named by Friedman et al., composite models as a range of recent evidence strongly suggests that no single acoustic measure can fully predict the complex experience of consonance.

Three Questions Concerning Consonance Perception

I discuss three fundamental questions underpinning the study of consonance: 1) What features cause a particular chord to be perceived as consonant? 2) How did humans evolve the ability to perceive these features? 3) Why did humans evolve to attribute particular aesthetic valences to these features (if they did at all)? The first question has been addressed by several recent articles, including Friedman, Kowalewski, Vuvan, and Neill (2021), with the common conclusion that consonance in Western listeners is driven by multiple features such as harmonicity, interference between partials, and familiarity. On this basis, it seems relatively straightforward to answer the second question: each of these consonance features seems to be grounded in fundamental aspects of human auditory perception, such as auditory scene analysis and auditory long-term memory. However, the third question is harder to resolve. I describe several potential answers, and argue that the present evidence is insufficient to distinguish between them, despite what has been claimed in the literature. I conclude by discussing what kinds of future studies might be able to shed light on this problem.

Learning Challenging L2 Sounds Via Computer Training: High-Variability Perceptual Training for Children and Adults

ABSTRACT Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2) to examine whether a high-variability perceptual training (HVPT) paradigm might enhance the perception of challenging contrasts between English voiced and voiceless stop consonants. Learners in all the age groups tested – middle childhood, early adolescence, and young adulthood – showed enhanced perception of English stop consonants after 20 five-minute training sessions conducted across 4 to 6 weeks, based on audio-recorded input coupled with corrective feedback. The training benefits were maintained at the one-month follow-up. Our results suggest that HVPT using audio-recordings of native speakers can be an affordable and useful language enrichment to supplement live interaction with native speakers, for L2 learners of a wide age range.

Silence-cued stop perception: Split decisions

Bastian, Eimas, &amp; Liberman (1961) found that listeners heard a [p] when a silence of more than 50ms was inserted between the [s] and the [l] in a recording of the word slit. It has long been known that silence is an important cue in stop consonant perception. Nevertheless, it is surprising that a short interval of silence can substitute for something as acoustically and articulatorily complex as a phoneme. In the present work, we replicate and expand upon this study to further examine the phenomenon of silence-cued stop perception. We demonstrate the ‘Split Effect’ in a previously unexplored set of environments, analyze factors that contribute to the identity of silence-cued stops, and lay the groundwork for further investigation of the acoustic and non-acoustic factors that contribute to this perceptual illusion. Our study demonstrates an experimental paradigm for studying the genesis of such effects synchronically and in a controlled setting.

An analysis of the perception of stop consonants in bilinguals and monolinguals in different phonetic contexts: A range-based language cueing approach.

Bilinguals' observed perceptual shift across language contexts for shared acoustic properties between their languages supports the idea that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, develop two phonemic representations for the same acoustic property. This phenomenon is known as the double phonemic boundary. This investigation replicated previous findings of bilinguals' double phonemic boundary across a series of go/no-go tasks while controlling for known confounding effects in speech perception (i.e., contrast effects) and differences in resource allocation between bilinguals and monolinguals (i.e., left-hand or right-hand response). Using a range-base language cueing approach, we designed 2 experiments. The first experiment tested whether a voice onset time (VOT) range representative of either Spanish or English phonetic categories can cue bilinguals, but not monolinguals, to use language-specific perceptual routines. The second experiment tested a VOT range with a mixture of Spanish and English phonetic categories to determine whether directing attention to a specific phonetic category can disambiguate the competition of the nonattended category. The results for Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals can rely on the distributional patterns of their native phonetic categories to activate specific language modes. Experiment 2 showed that attention can change the weight given to a native phonetic distinction. However, this process is restricted by the internal phonetic composition of the native language(s).