Suprasegmental Cues Research Articles

Second Language Sentence Stress Assignment: Self‐ and Other‐Assessment

AbstractResearch on second language (L2) pronunciation self‐assessment reports a general misalignment between self‐ and other‐assessment. This has been attributed to the object of self‐assessment, the self‐assessment task, the measures to which self‐assessment is compared, and speakers’ characteristics. Here, we examined self‐assessment of a discrete phonological feature—sentence stress—by L2 English speakers as compared to the assessment of first language English listeners through a timed, forced‐choice judgment task with low‐pass filtered stimuli, which contained only suprasegmental cues. Additionally, we explored how individual differences among speakers predict self‐assessment. Speakers generally overestimated their accuracy in sentence stress assignment in a pattern resembling the Dunning‐Kruger effect despite the controlled nature of the task. Speakers with larger vocabulary size judged their sentence stress assignment as correct more often and showed greater overconfidence and miscalibration. Finally, the assessments of speakers with a background in applied linguistics and/or language teaching were more aligned with listeners’ assessments.

How rhythmic cues influence perception of accent distance across L1 and L2 English speakers

Segmental and suprasegmental cues can both contribute to listeners’ accent strength and distance judgments. This study examined the influence of a suprasegmental cue—rhythm—on listeners’ judgments of accent distance. Rhythm was quantified using two measures of variability in vocalic interval duration: normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and VarcoV. Thirty adults ranked productions from female and male speakers from six L1 and six L2 English varieties (24 speakers) across six sentences based on their perceived distance from Midland American English (the local dialect). Linear mixed effect models predicted accent distance ratings from rhythm measures—specifically, differences in nPVI and VarcoV between the L1/L2 speakers and Midland speakers, with speaking rate and sentence length as covariates. Differences between L1/L2 speakers’ and Midland speakers’ nPVI and VarcoV scores did not significantly predict accent distance rankings. However, significant interactions between nPVI and certain accents (e.g., Irish, Southern American, Cantonese-accented English) suggest that rhythmic properties may significantly impact accent distance judgements for some accent varieties. These results provide further insight into how rhythmic cues contribute to accent perception. [Work supported by NSF grants 1941691 and 1941662].

The contribution of suprasegmental cues to perceived L1 and L2 accent distance

First (L1) and second language (L2) pronunciations that diverge more segmentally from the local accent are rated as more distant. However, fewer studies have addressed relations between suprasegmental features, such as intonation, and accent distance. We examined the relation between perceived accent distance and four suprasegmental measures: time normalized f0 Euclidean distance, mean F0, pitch range, and speaking rate. Thirty adults completed six ladder tasks in which listeners ranked talkers’ perceived distance from the local accent. For each ladder, listeners heard one sentence produced by 24 talkers: one man and one woman from six L1 and six L2 English varieties. Each suprasegmental measure independently predicted distance rankings with a variety of significant interactions. Talkers with higher accent rankings had narrower pitch ranges, lower mean f0, faster speech, and greater f0 Euclidean distance. Furthermore, suprasegmental measures related to accent distance differentially based on syntactic structure. For example, as f0 Euclidean distance increased, accent rankings increased for interrogative sentences, but not for declarative sentences. These data support the need for future studies examining how suprasegmental features impact perception of L1 and L2 accents. [Work supported by NSF grants 1941691 and 1941662].

A novel method for measuring perception of suprasegmental cues in speech

While the perception of segmental cues in speech has been extensively studied, evidence on the perception of suprasegmental cues is largely missing. A critical barrier in this area is the challenge in measuring listeners’ ability to perceive a combination of multiple acoustic cues. The classic paradigm of discrimination is limited by its heavy reliance on auditory short-term memory and a long testing time. This study aims at examining the utility of a novel measure that is potentially more efficient and offers a more fine-grained account of perception of suprasegmental cues. Built on the evidence that listeners can shadow and rapidly imitate speech cues faithfully, we use the degree of alignment between listeners’ rapid imitation of suprasegmental cues and that of the speech stimuli as an index of perception quality. This alignment is mathematically quantified by the dynamic time warping (DTW) method, which is modified to simultaneously account for both the intensity and the fundamental frequency sequences to render more reliable alignment results. Data to date provided rich information regarding individual differences in perception, and results obtained from rapid imitation showed improved utility over those from the discrimination. The theoretical and clinical implication of this work is also discussed.

Swift Prosodic Modulation of Lexical Access: Brain Potentials From Three North Germanic Language Varieties.

According to most models of spoken word recognition, listeners probabilistically activate a set of lexical candidates, which is incrementally updated as the speech signal unfolds. Speech carries segmental (speech sound) as well as suprasegmental (prosodic) information. The role of the latter in spoken word recognition is less clear. We investigated how suprasegments (tone and voice quality) in three North Germanic language varieties affected lexical access by scrutinizing temporally fine-grained neurophysiological effects of lexical uncertainty and information gain. Three event-related potential (ERP) studies were reanalyzed. In all varieties investigated, suprasegments are associated with specific word endings. Swedish has two lexical "word accents" realized as pitch falls with different timings across dialects. In Danish, the distinction is in voice quality. We combined pronunciation lexica and frequency lists to calculate estimates of lexical uncertainty about an unfolding word and information gain upon hearing a suprasegmental cue and the segment upon which it manifests. We used single-trial mixed-effects regression models run every 4 ms. Only lexical uncertainty showed solid results: a frontal effect at 150-400 ms after suprasegmental cue onset and a later posterior effect after 200 ms. While a model including only segmental information mostly performed better, it was outperformed by the suprasegmental model at 200-330 ms at frontal sites. The study points to suprasegmental cues contributing to lexical access over and beyond segments after around 200 ms in the North Germanic varieties investigated. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a previously reported "pre-activation negativity" predominantly reflects forward-looking processing. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25016486.

Listening like a native: Unprofitable procedures need to be discarded

AbstractTwo languages, historically related, both have lexical stress, with word stress distinctions signalled in each by the same suprasegmental cues. In each language, words can overlap segmentally but differ in placement of primary versus secondary stress (OCtopus, ocTOber). However, secondary stress occurs more often in the words of one language, Dutch, than in the other, English, and largely because of this, Dutch listeners find it helpful to use suprasegmental stress cues when recognising spoken words. English listeners, in contrast, do not; indeed, Dutch listeners can outdo English listeners in correctly identifying the source words of English word fragments (oc-). Here we show that Dutch-native listeners who reside in an English-speaking environment and have become dominant in English, though still maintaining their use of these stress cues in their L1, ignore the same cues in their L2 English, performing as poorly in the fragment identification task as the L1 English do.

일본어 및 중국어권 한국어 학습자 유창성 초분절 요소 습득 비교 연구

The study aims at examining the role of L1 background language and L2 proficiency level in acquiring the L2 fluency. For the purpose, we investigate acoustical changes of 5 suprasegmental cues by using parameters of the proficiency levels of Japanese and Chinese learners of Korean. Before the experiments, we predict that L2 learners with advanced levels of Korean and L1 background language approximated to the suprasegmental structure of Korean are more likely to acquire L2 Korean fluency. One hundred fifty two subjects with six groups ((Japanese, Mandarin Chinese) * (elementary, intermediate, advanced)) take part in the experiment with native Korean speakers as a control group. The results show that both parameters of the L1 background language and L2 proficiency levels have influence equally on the acquisition of the L2 Korean suprasegmentals. However, the extent is different. For example, the L1 effect decreased over the L2 proficiency levels; the advanced levels of both L1 groups acquired L2 Korean prosody in a similar extent. Also some acoustical cues trigger an uneven influence on Korean natives’ ratings for L2 Korean suprasegmentals; speech rate seems to be the most important cue, whereas the spectrum cues do not.

Perceptual weighting on English lexical stress by Korean learners of English

This study examined which acoustic cue(s) that Korean learners of English give weight to in perceiving English lexical stress. We manipulated segmental and suprasegmental cues in 5 steps in the first and second syllables of an English stress minimal pair “object”. A total of 27 subjects (14 native speakers of English and 13 Korean L2 learners) participated in the English stress judgment task. The results revealed that native Korean listeners used the F0 and intensity cues in identifying English stress and weighted vowel quality most strongly, as native English listeners did. These results indicate that Korean learners’ experience with these cues in L1 prosody can help them attend to these cues in their L2 perception. However, L2 learners’ perceptual attention is not entirely predicted by their linguistic experience with specific acoustic cues in their native language.

Perception of speaker sincerity in complex social interactions by cochlear implant users.

Understanding insincere language (sarcasm and teasing) is a fundamental part of communication and crucial for maintaining social relationships. This can be a challenging task for cochlear implant (CIs) users who receive degraded suprasegmental information important for perceiving a speaker’s attitude. We measured the perception of speaker sincerity (literal positive, literal negative, sarcasm, and teasing) in 16 adults with CIs using an established video inventory. Participants were presented with audio-only and audio-visual social interactions between two people with and without supporting verbal context. They were instructed to describe the content of the conversation and answer whether the speakers meant what they said. Results showed that subjects could not always identify speaker sincerity, even when the content of the conversation was perfectly understood. This deficit was greater for perceiving insincere relative to sincere utterances. Performance improved when additional visual cues or verbal context cues were provided. Subjects who were better at perceiving the content of the interactions in the audio-only condition benefited more from having additional visual cues for judging the speaker’s sincerity, suggesting that the two modalities compete for cognitive recourses. Perception of content also did not correlate with perception of speaker sincerity, suggesting that what was said vs. how it was said were perceived using unrelated segmental versus suprasegmental cues. Our results further showed that subjects who had access to lower-order resolved harmonic information provided by hearing aids in the contralateral ear identified speaker sincerity better than those who used implants alone. These results suggest that measuring speech recognition alone in CI users does not fully describe the outcome. Our findings stress the importance of measuring social communication functions in people with CIs.

The perception of word stress cues in Papuan Malay: A typological perspective and experimental investigation

Analyses of word prosody have shown that in some Indonesian languages listeners do not make use of word stress cues. The outcomes have contributed to the conclusion that these languages do not have word stress. The current study revisits this conclusion and investigates to what extent speakers of Papuan Malay, a language of Eastern Indonesia, use suprasegmental stress cues to recognize words. Acoustically, this language exhibits predictable word level prominence patterns, which could facilitate word recognition. However, the literature lacks a crucial perceptual verification, and related languages in the Trade Malay family have been analyzed as stressless. This could be indicative of either regional variation or different criteria to diagnose word stress. To investigate this issue, the current study reviews the literature on which criteria were decisive to diagnose (the absence of) word stress in Indonesian and Trade Malay. An acoustic analysis and a gating task investigate the usefulness of Papuan Malay stress cues for word recognition. Results show that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use suprasegmental stress cues to identify words. The outcomes are discussed in a typological perspective to shed light on how production and perception studies contribute to stress diagnosis cross-linguistically.

Evidence For Selective Adaptation and Recalibration in the Perception of Lexical Stress.

Individuals vary in how they produce speech. This variability affects both the segments (vowels and consonants) and the suprasegmental properties of their speech (prosody). Previous literature has demonstrated that listeners can adapt to variability in how different talkers pronounce the segments of speech. This study shows that listeners can also adapt to variability in how talkers produce lexical stress. Experiment 1 demonstrates a selective adaptation effect in lexical stress perception: repeatedly hearing Dutch trochaic words biased perception of a subsequent lexical stress continuum towards more iamb responses. Experiment 2 demonstrates a recalibration effect in lexical stress perception: when ambiguous suprasegmental cues to lexical stress were disambiguated by lexical orthographic context as signaling a trochaic word in an exposure phase, Dutch participants categorized a subsequent test continuum as more trochee-like. Moreover, the selective adaptation and recalibration effects generalized to novel words, not encountered during exposure. Together, the experiments demonstrate that listeners also flexibly adapt to variability in the suprasegmental properties of speech, thus expanding our understanding of the utility of listener adaptation in speech perception. Moreover, the combined outcomes speak for an architecture of spoken word recognition involving abstract prosodic representations at a prelexical level of analysis.

Vowel Quality and Direction of Stress Shift in a Predictive Model Explaining the Varying Impact of Misplaced Word Stress: Evidence From English

The use of suprasegmental cues to word stress occurs across many languages. Nevertheless, L1 English listeners' pay little attention to suprasegmental word stress cues and evidence shows that segmental cues are more important to L1 English listeners in how words are identified in speech. L1 English listeners assume strong syllables with full vowels mark the beginning of a new word, attempting alternative resegmentations only when this heuristic fails to identify a viable word string. English word stress errors have been shown to severely disrupt processing for both L1 and L2 listeners, but not all word stress errors are equally damaging. Vowel quality and direction of stress shift are thought to be predictors of the intelligibility of non-standard stress pronunciations—but most research so far on this topic has been limited to two-syllable words. The current study uses auditory lexical decision and delayed word identification tasks to test a hypothesized English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy for words of two to five syllables. Results indicate that English word stress errors affect intelligibility most when they introduce concomitant vowel errors, an effect that is somewhat mediated by the direction of stress shift. As a consequence, the relative intelligibility impact of any particular lexical stress error can be predicted by the Hierarchy for both L1 and L2 English listeners. These findings have implications for L1 and L2 English pronunciation research and teaching. For research, our results demonstrate that varied findings about loss of intelligibility are connected to vowel quality changes of word stress errors and that these factors must be accounted for in intelligibility research. For teaching, the results indicate that not all word stress errors are equally important, and that only word stress errors that affect vowel quality should be prioritized.

Contrastive perception of duration and F0 cues for stop categorization.

This study examined the role of linguistic experience in the contrastive perception of suprasegmental cues for stop categorization. Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin and naive listeners labeled word-medial unaspirated stops (e.g., ma.pa) as either fortis [long closure-high F0] or lenis [short closure-low F0]. The results revealed comparable effects of relative duration for both groups: shorter neighboring vowels elicited more fortis responses, arising from longer perceived stop closure. However, F0 contours were processed contrastively only for the learners: stops were perceived as fortis before vowels with lower offset F0, which may have contributed to a higher perceived onset F0.

Effects of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements in the visual world paradigm: Evidence from aging, native, and non-native language processing.

Research has shown that suprasegmental cues in conjunction with visual context can lead to anticipatory (or predictive) eye movements. However, the impact of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements has received little empirical attention. The purpose of the current study was twofold. From a methodological perspective, we tested the impact of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements by systemically varying speech rate (3.5, 4.5, 5.5, and 6.0 syllables per second) in the processing of filler-gap dependencies. From a theoretical perspective, we examined two groups thought to show fewer anticipatory eye movements, and thus likely to be more impacted by speech rate. Experiment 1 compared anticipatory eye movements across the lifespan with younger (18-24 years old) and older adults (40-75 years old). Experiment 2 compared L1 speakers of English and L2 speakers of English with an L1 of German. Results showed that all groups made anticipatory eye movements. However, L2 speakers only made anticipatory eye movements at 3.5 syllables per second, older adults at 3.5 and 4.5 syllables per second, and younger adults at speech rates up to 5.5 syllables per second. At the fastest speech rate, all groups showed a marked decrease in anticipatory eye movements. This work highlights (1) the importance of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements, and (2) group-level performance differences in filler-gap prediction.

Universals of listening: Equivalent prosodic entrainment in tone and non-tone languages

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. Here, we ask whether this strategy is universally available, even in languages with very different phonological systems (e.g., tone versus non-tone languages). In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment also occurs in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where the use of various suprasegmental cues to lexical identity may take precedence over their use in salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted high stress on the target-bearing word, and the lexical tone of the target word (i.e., rising versus falling) did not affect the Mandarin listeners' response. Further, the extent to which prosodic entrainment was used to detect the target phoneme was the same in both English and Mandarin listeners. Nevertheless, native Mandarin speakers did not adopt an entrainment strategy when the sentences were presented in English, consistent with the suggestion that L2 listening may be strained by additional functional load from prosodic processing. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the perception of focus structure in everyday discourse.

Repetition enhancement to voice identities in the dog brain

In the human speech signal, cues of speech sounds and voice identities are conflated, but they are processed separately in the human brain. The processing of speech sounds and voice identities is typically performed by non-primary auditory regions in humans and non-human primates. Additionally, these processes exhibit functional asymmetry in humans, indicating the involvement of distinct mechanisms. Behavioural studies indicate analogue side biases in dogs, but neural evidence for this functional dissociation is missing. In two experiments, using an fMRI adaptation paradigm, we presented awake dogs with natural human speech that either varied in segmental (change in speech sound) or suprasegmental (change in voice identity) content. In auditory regions, we found a repetition enhancement effect for voice identity processing in a secondary auditory region – the caudal ectosylvian gyrus. The same region did not show repetition effects for speech sounds, nor did the primary auditory cortex exhibit sensitivity to changes either in the segmental or in the suprasegmental content. Furthermore, we did not find evidence for functional asymmetry neither in the processing of speech sounds or voice identities. Our results in dogs corroborate former human and non-human primate evidence on the role of secondary auditory regions in the processing of suprasegmental cues, suggesting similar neural sensitivity to the identity of the vocalizer across the mammalian order.

The role of lexical stress in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract Two perceptual experiments investigated how the suprasegmental information of monosyllables is perceived and exploited in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin (TM). Using an auditory lexical decision task in which correctly stressed English words and mis-stressed nonwords (e.g. camPAIGN vs. *CAMpaign) were presented for lexical decisions, Experiment I demonstrated that TM listeners could perceive the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables with native-like accuracy and rapidity. To examine how the perceived suprasegmental contrast would constrain English lexical access, Experiment II was conducted. It used a cross-modal fragment priming task in which a lexical decision had to be made for a visually presented English word or nonword following an auditory prime, which was a spoken word-initial syllable. The results showed that English and TM listeners recognized the displayed word (e.g. campus) faster both after a stress-matching (e.g. CAM-) prime and a stress-mismatching (e.g. cam-) prime than after a control prime (e.g. MOUN-, with mismatching segments). This indicates that suprasegmental information does not inhibit a segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching word candidate for both the two groups, although TM is a language where lexical prosody is expressed syllabically and its listeners tend to interpret lexical stress tonally. Yet, the two groups’ responses were slower after the stressed primes than after the unstressed ones, presumably because the former generally had more possible continuations than the latter do. It is therefore concluded that when recognizing spoken English words, both the native and non-native (TM-speaking) listeners can exploit the suprasegmental cues of monosyllables, which, however, are not so effective that they will outweigh the segmental cues.

Discrepancy between heritage speakers' use of suprasegmental cues in the perception and production of Spanish lexical stress

AbstractThis study investigates Spanish heritage speakers' perception and production of Spanish lexical stress. Stress minimal pairs in various prosodic contexts were used to examine whether heritage speakers successfully identify the stress location despite varying suprasegmental cues (Experiment 1) and whether they use these cues in their production (Experiment 2). Heritage speakers' performance was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners. In Experiment 1, the heritage speakers showed a clear advantage over the L2 learners and their performance was comparable to that of the monolinguals. In Experiment 2, both the heritage speakers and the L2 learners showed deviating patterns from the monolinguals; they produced a large overlap between paroxytones and oxytones, especially in duration. The discrepancy between heritage speakers' perception and production suggests that, while early exposure to heritage language is beneficial for the perception of heritage language speech sounds, this factor alone does not guarantee target-like production.

English Learners’ Use of Segmental and Suprasegmental Cues to Stress in Lexical Access: An Eye‐Tracking Study

AbstractThis study investigated the use of segmental and suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in word recognition by Mandarin‐speaking English learners, Korean‐speaking English learners, and native English listeners. Unlike English and Mandarin, Korean does not have lexical stress. Participants completed a visual‐world eye‐tracking experiment that examined whether listeners’ word recognition is constrained by suprasegmental cues to stress alone or by a combination of segmental and suprasegmental cues. Results showed that English listeners used both suprasegmental cues alone and segmental and suprasegmental cues together to recognize English words, with the effect of stress being greater for combined cues. Conversely, Mandarin listeners used stress in lexical access only when stress was signaled by suprasegmental cues alone, and Korean listeners did so only when stress was signaled by segmental and suprasegmental cues together. These results highlight the importance of a cue‐based approach to the study of stress in word recognition.Open PracticesThis article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS Repository athttps://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science:https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

Early L2 Spoken Word Recognition Combines Input-Based and Knowledge-Based Processing.

This study examines the perceptual trade-off between knowledge of a language's statistical regularities and reliance on the acoustic signal during L2 spoken word recognition. We test how early learners track and make use of segmental and suprasegmental cues and their relative frequencies during non-native word recognition. English learners of Mandarin were taught an artificial tonal language in which a tone's informativeness for word identification varied according to neighborhood density. The stimuli mimicked Mandarin's uneven distribution of syllable+tone combinations by varying syllable frequency and the probability of particular tones co-occurring with a particular syllable. Use of statistical regularities was measured by four-alternative forced-choice judgments and by eye fixations to target and competitor symbols. Half of the participants were trained on one speaker, that is, low speaker variability while the other half were trained on four speakers. After four days of learning, the results confirmed that tones are processed according to their informativeness. Eye movements to the newly learned symbols demonstrated that L2 learners use tonal probabilities at an early stage of word recognition, regardless of speaker variability. The amount of variability in the signal, however, influenced the time course of recovery from incorrect anticipatory looks: participants exposed to low speaker variability recovered from incorrect probability-based predictions of tone more rapidly than participants exposed to greater variability. These results motivate two conclusions: early L2 learners track the distribution of segmental and suprasegmental co-occurrences and make predictions accordingly during spoken word recognition; and when the acoustic input is more variable because of multi-speaker input, listeners rely more on their knowledge of tone-syllable co-occurrence frequency distributions and less on the incoming acoustic signal.