Theories Of Speech Perception Research Articles

Selected models of speech perception by students 5 semester English Education Study Program Universitas Nias of english during lecturing

Understanding speech (speech perception) is an important ability that English language students must master. There are several theoretical models of speech comprehension that attempt to explain the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying this ability. As for speech perception models, 1) Motor Theory of Speech Perception, 2) Analysis-by-Synthesis, 3) Group Model, 4) Fuzzy Logic Model, 5) TRACE Model. This study aims to find out what kind of speech perception model used by students in lectures, especially in the process of teaching and learning English. Specifically, this research is classified as qualitative research. To collect data, the participants studied were the 5th semester population of the English education study program, especially at Nias University. Random samples were used and the samples were 7 people from class A. From the results that have been obtained, there are 4 (four) students classified as using the Cohort model, 2 (two) students classified as using the Motor Theory model, and 1 (one) student classified as using the Fuzzy Logical Model, so we can conclude that most students use the Cohort model they often use this model in English learning activities every day.

How does voice familiarity affect speech intelligibility?

People often face the challenge of understanding speech when other sounds are present ("speech-in-noise perception")—which involves a variety of cognitive processes, such as attention and prior knowledge. We have consistently found that familiarity with a person’s voice improves the ability to understand speech-in-noise, using both naturally familiar (e.g., friends and partners) and lab-trained voices. In this talk, I will describe experiments in which we manipulated voice acoustics (such as fundamental frequency and formant spacing). For example, we have measured the smallest deviations in acoustics that listeners can discriminate for familiar and unfamiliar voices, and have examined how manipulations to voice acoustics affect voice recognition and speech intelligibility for familiar voices. This work has provided insights into the processes underlying the familiar-voice intelligibility benefit—for example, by contrasting explanations based on predictions of voice acoustics with those involving cognitive demands. I will discuss the implications of our findings for theories of speech perception, and the implications for populations who typically find speech perception particularly challenging (e.g., older adults).

Gender stereotypes and social perception of vocal confidence is mitigated by salience of socio-indexical cues to gender.

Socio-indexical cues to gender and vocal affect often interact and sometimes lead listeners to make differential judgements of affective intent based on the gender of the speaker. Previous research suggests that rising intonation is a common cue that both women and men produce to communicate lack of confidence, but listeners are more sensitive to this cue when it is produced by women. Some speech perception theories assume that listeners will track conditional statistics of speech and language cues (e.g., frequency of the socio-indexical cues to gender and affect) in their listening and communication environments during speech perception. It is currently less clear if these conditional statistics will impact listener ratings when context varies (e.g., number of talkers). To test this, we presented listeners with vocal utterances from one female and one male-pitched voice (single talker condition) or many female/male-pitched voices (4 female voices; 4 female voices pitch-shifted to a male range) to examine how they impacted perceptions of talker confidence. Results indicated that when one voice was evaluated, listeners defaulted to the gender stereotype that the female voice using rising intonation (a cue to lack of confidence) was less confident than the male-pitched voice (using the same cue). However, in the multi-talker condition, this effect went away and listeners equally rated the confidence of the female and male-pitched voices. Findings support dual process theories of information processing, such that listeners may rely on heuristics when speech perception is devoid of context, but when there are no differentiating qualities across talkers (regardless of gender), listeners may be ideal adapters who focus on only the relevant cues.

Disordered speech recognition considering low resources and abnormal articulation

The success of automatic speech recognition (ASR) benefits a great number of healthy people, but not people with disorders. The speech disordered may truly need support from technology, while they actually gain little. The difficulties of disordered ASR arise from the limited availability of data and the abnormal nature of speech, e.g, unclear, unstable, and incorrect pronunciations. To realize the ASR of disordered speech, this study addresses the problems of disordered speech in two respects, low resources, and articulatory abnormality. In order to solve the problem of low resources, this study proposes staged knowledge distillation (KD), which provides different references to the student models according to their mastery of knowledge, so as to avoid feature overfitting. To tackle the articulatory abnormalities in dysarthria, we propose an intended phonological perception method (IPPM) by applying the motor theory of speech perception to ASR, in which pieces of intended phonological features are estimated and provided to ASR. And further, we solve the challenges of disordered ASR by combining the staged KD and the IPPM. TORGO database and UASEECH corpus are two commonly used datasets of dysarthria which is the main cause of speech disorders. Experiments on the two datasets validated the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Compared with the baseline, the proposed method achieves 35.14%∼38.12% relative phoneme error rate reductions (PERRs) for speakers with varying degrees of dysarthria on the TORGO database and relative 8.17%∼13.00% PERRs on the UASPEECH corpus. The experiments demonstrated that addressing disordered speech from both low resources and speech abnormality is an effective way to solve the problems, and the proposed methods significantly improved the performance of ASR for disordered speech.

Contrasting Accounts of Early Speech Perception and Production.

Language researchers have historically either dismissed or ignored completely behavioral accounts of language acquisition while at the same time acknowledging the important role of experience in language learning. Many language researchers have also moved away from theories based on an innate generative universal grammar and promoted experience-dependent and usage-based theories of language. These theories suggest that hearing and using language in its context is critical for learning language. However, rather than appealing to empirically derived principles to explain the learning, these theories appeal to inferred cognitive mechanisms. In this article, I describe a usage-based theory of language acquisition as a recent example of a more general cognitive linguistic theory and note both logical and methodological problems. I then present a behavior-analytic theory of speech perception and production and contrast it with cognitive theories. Even though some researchers acknowledge the role of social feedback (they rarely call it reinforcement) in vocal learning, they omit the important role played by automatic reinforcement. I conclude by describing automatic reinforcement as the missing link in a parsimonious account of vocal development in human infants and making comparisons to vocal development in songbirds.

Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization.

For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception. This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming that any deviation from discreteness was a deficit. This is particularly problematic for listeners like heritage speakers whose language proficiency, both in their heritage language and their majority language, is questioned. However, we now know that in the monolingual listener, speech perception is gradient and listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details, recover from ambiguity, and aid learning and adaptation. This calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to bilingualism. We present the Visual Analogue Scaling task which avoids the discrete and binary assumptions of categorical perception and can capture gradiency more precisely than other measures. Our goal is to provide bilingualism researchers new conceptual and empirical tools that can help examine speech categorization in different bilingual communities without the necessity of forcing their speech categorization into discrete units and without assuming a deficit model.

Towards a somatosensory theory of speech perception.

Speech perception is known to be a multimodal process, relying not only on auditory input but also on the visual system and possibly on the motor system as well. To date there has been little work on the potential involvement of the somatosensory system in speech perception. In the present review, we identify the somatosensory system as another contributor to speech perception. First, we argue that evidence in favor of a motor contribution to speech perception can just as easily be interpreted as showing somatosensory involvement. Second, physiological and neuroanatomical evidence for auditory-somatosensory interactions across the auditory hierarchy indicates the availability of a neural infrastructure that supports somatosensory involvement in auditory processing in general. Third, there is accumulating evidence for somatosensory involvement in the context of speech specifically. In particular, tactile stimulation modifies speech perception, and speech auditory input elicits activity in somatosensory cortical areas. Moreover, speech sounds can be decoded from activity in somatosensory cortex; lesions to this region affect perception, and vowels can be identified based on somatic input alone. We suggest that the somatosensory involvement in speech perception derives from the somatosensory-auditory pairing that occurs during speech production and learning. By bringing together findings from a set of studies that have not been previously linked, the present article identifies the somatosensory system as a presently unrecognized contributor to speech perception.

Interactions between acoustic challenges and processing depth in speech perception as measured by task-evoked pupil response.

Speech perception under adverse conditions is a multistage process involving a dynamic interplay among acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic factors. Nevertheless, prior research has primarily focused on factors within this complex system in isolation. The primary goal of the present study was to examine the interaction between processing depth and the acoustic challenge of noise and its effect on processing effort during speech perception in noise. Two tasks were used to represent different depths of processing. The speech recognition task involved repeating back a sentence after auditory presentation (higher-level processing), while the tiredness judgment task entailed a subjective judgment of whether the speaker sounded tired (lower-level processing). The secondary goal of the study was to investigate whether pupil response to alteration of dynamic pitch cues stems from difficult linguistic processing of speech content in noise or a perceptual novelty effect due to the unnatural pitch contours. Task-evoked peak pupil response from two groups of younger adult participants with typical hearing was measured in two experiments. Both tasks (speech recognition and tiredness judgment) were implemented in both experiments, and stimuli were presented with background noise in Experiment 1 and without noise in Experiment 2. Increased peak pupil dilation was associated with deeper processing (i.e., the speech recognition task), particularly in the presence of background noise. Importantly, there is a non-additive interaction between noise and task, as demonstrated by the heightened peak pupil dilation to noise in the speech recognition task as compared to in the tiredness judgment task. Additionally, peak pupil dilation data suggest dynamic pitch alteration induced an increased perceptual novelty effect rather than reflecting effortful linguistic processing of the speech content in noise. These findings extend current theories of speech perception under adverse conditions by demonstrating that the level of processing effort expended by a listener is influenced by the interaction between acoustic challenges and depth of linguistic processing. The study also provides a foundation for future work to investigate the effects of this complex interaction in clinical populations who experience both hearing and cognitive challenges.

Motion iconicity in prosody

Evidence suggests that human non-verbal speech may be rich in iconicity. Here, we report results from two experiments aimed at testing whether perception of increasing and decliningf0can be iconically mapped onto motion events. We presented a sample of mixed-nationality participants (N= 118) with sets of two videos, where one pictured upward movement and the other downward movement. A disyllabic non-sense word prosodically resynthesized as increasing or declining inf0was presented simultaneously with each video in a pair, and participants were tasked with guessing which of the two videos the word described. Results indicate that prosody is iconically associated with motion, such that motion-prosody congruent pairings were more readily selected than incongruent pairings (p< 0.033). However, the effect observed in our sample was primarily driven by selections of words with decliningf0. A follow-up experiment with native Turkish speaking participants (N= 92) tested for the effect of language-specific metaphor for auditory pitch. Results showed no significant association between prosody and motion. Limitations of the experiment, and some implications for the motor theory of speech perception, and “gestural origins” theories of language evolution, are discussed.

V-to-V coarticulation may be extinct in the wild

Ever since the results of [S. E. G. Öhman, “Coarticulation…,” J. Ascoust. Soc. Am. 39, 151 (1966)] that a vowel could affect the preceding one, the phenomenon of anticipatory VCV coarticulation has been a subject of study. Most results establishing these effects have been obtained from curated laboratory speech [e.g., M. Grosvald, “Interspeaker variation…,” J. Phonetics 37, 173 (2009)], showing anticipatory V-to-V coarticulation across one, two and three syllables in English utterances. Here, we attempted to replicate these findings “in the wild” using the Buckeye Corpus of conversational English. F1 and F2 of [ʌ] or [ə] tokens were obtained in all [ʌ/ə]C(C…)V contexts. Two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnoff tests were carried out to compare the F1/F2 distributions of these tokens in different contexts. The formant distributions of [ʌ/ə] in specific vowel contexts were also compared with the total formant distributions of [ʌ/ə] in all contexts. The replication effort was a failure. Essentially no significant differences of the [ʌ/ə] formant distributions could be found among the data, no matter how extreme the difference of the following vowel (e.g., [i] vs [ɑ] contexts). This poses a problem for theories of speech perception which rely on such effects.

Better speech-in-noise comprehension is associated with enhanced neural speech tracking in older adults with hearing impairment

The alignment between low-frequency activity in the brain and slow acoustic modulations in the speech signal depicts a core principle in present theories of speech perception—a process referred to as ‘neural speech tracking’. While most older adults, particularly those with highly prevalent age-related hearing loss, have difficulties with speech perception and comprehension, the impact of hearing loss on neural speech tracking is still unclear. In this study we investigated the effects of pure-tone hearing loss and different types of background noise on the neural tracking response in a large sample of older adults (N = 101). Furthermore, we examined whether the neural tracking response was predictive for speech comprehension. For this purpose, we obtained scalp EEG from our participants who had varying degrees of pure-tone hearing loss (7.5–59.6 dB HL for .5–8 kHz pure tones) while they listened to sentences in quiet, pink and multi-talker babble noise. Speech tracking was quantified by computing the cross-correlation between the EEG signal and the amplitude envelope of the sentences heard. A higher degree of pure-tone hearing loss was associated with greater neural speech tracking (i.e., greater cross-correlation). Additionally, neural speech tracking showed a positive association with speech comprehension. This relationship was modulated by the degree of pure-tone hearing loss with hearing-impaired participants benefitting more from greater neural speech tracking. Our results highlight the potential of neural speech tracking as an objective measure of speech comprehension and as a possible target mechanism for clinical interventions such as neurofeedback. Furthermore, the interaction between speech tracking and pure-tone hearing loss suggests a compensatory mechanism by which the hearing-impaired rely more on slow amplitude modulations in the speech signal.

Перцептивные стратегии в ситуации синхронного перевода английской речи носителей языков Восточной Азии

The paper aims to provide an insight into the features of application of perception strategies by simultaneous interpreters in the situation of conference translation of English speech of speakers from East Asia. The article provides a description of perception strategies developed within the theory of speech perception. The study emphasizes the importance of improving the interpreter’s competence when working with the speech which has the features of East Asian accent by means of expanding the perceptual base of interpreters. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it considers the actualization mechanism of perception strategies when working with the speech which has the features of East Asian accent. As a result, it has been proved that the improvement of the interpreter’s competence is achieved through the knowledge of systemic features of the pronunciation usus of the varieties of English in East Asia.

Attention, task demands, and multitalker processing costs in speech perception.

Determining how human listeners achieve phonetic constancy despite a variable mapping between the acoustics of speech and phonemic categories is the longest standing challenge in speech perception. A clue comes from studies where the talker changes randomly between stimuli, which slows processing compared with a single-talker baseline. These multitalker processing costs have been observed most often in speeded monitoring paradigms, where participants respond whenever a specific item occurs. Notably, the conventional paradigm imposes attentional demands via two forms of varied mapping in mixed-talker conditions. First, target recycling (i.e., allowing items to serve as targets on some trials but as distractors on others) potentially prevents the development of task automaticity. Second, in mixed trials, participants must respond to two unique stimuli (i.e., one target produced by each talker), whereas in blocked conditions, they need respond to only one token (i.e., multiple target tokens). We seek to understand how attentional demands influence talker normalization, as measured by multitalker processing costs. Across four experiments, multitalker processing costs persisted when target recycling was not allowed but diminished when only one stimulus served as the target on mixed trials. We discuss the logic of using varied mapping to elicit attentional effects and implications for theories of speech perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Examining the link between speech perception and production through categorical boundaries

The link between speech perception and production is one of the central topics in speech perception theories. Newman (2003) examined the correlations between acoustic measures of listeners’ perceptual and production prototypes for a given speech category, and found significant correlations for stop consonants (VOT) and for voiceless fricatives (spectral peaks). Shultz et al. (2012) also investigated the possible link between perception and production by examining speakers’ relative cue weighting of VOT and f0 in word initial stops. Although their results showed no significant correlation between weighting of VOT in production and perception, they reported a trend toward a slightly positive correlation between production and perception for VOT values. The current study extends these findings and aims to explore the perception-production link by examining the relationship between the location of categorical boundaries (between /p/ and /b/) in perception and production. If mental representations for perception and production are directly linked, then speakers with higher VOT values in both categories in production would be expected to also show a higher categorical boundary in perception.

Phonetic accommodation of tone: Reversing a tone merger-in-progress via imitation

Previous literature has documented phonetic accommodation for various segmental and suprasegmental features, but the accommodation of tone remains under-explored. The current study contributes to the literature by investigating the accommodation of two merging tones in Hong Kong Cantonese, mid-level Tone 3 (T3) and low-level Tone 6 (T6), in a speech shadowing experiment. Specifically, we ask whether shadowers will reverse the merging trend after exposure to a model talker with distinct T3–T6 productions and if so, what factors will modulate the accommodative behaviors. Evidence for phonetic imitation is observed, but the effect varies by shadower’s baseline production of T3–T6 distinction and across different model talkers. Shadowers with less baseline tonal distinction exhibit greater degrees of imitation, suggesting that greater linguistic distance facilitates imitation. More robust imitation is observed in the young model talker condition, but the effect is most likely driven by the talker’s idiosyncratic production. Shadowers’ impression of the model talker and attitudes towards ongoing changes in the language did not show substantial impact on imitation. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech perception and production.

An Analysis of Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings for Orchestra and Electronics

In recent years an increasing number of composers have used speech as source material for instrumental, electronic and electroacoustic music. This article examines this particular intersection of music and language through an analysis of Jonathan Harvey’s Speakings for orchestra and electronics. I attempt to understand how Harvey made an orchestra sound like a human voice by analyzing his use of technology and his compositional techniques, particularly as they relate to existing theories of speech perception, acoustics and articulatory phonetics. This technical achievement is then placed in its broader musical context to examine the role that speech-sounds play in this piece, and the implications of hearing an orchestra speak in the context of this work’s narrative.

Effect of Music Training on Categorical Perception of Speech and Music.

Background and ObjectivesThe aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of music training on the characteristics of auditory perception of speech and music. The perception of speech and music stimuli was assessed across their respective stimulus continuum and the resultant plots were compared between musicians and non-musicians.Subjects and MethodsThirty musicians with formal music training and twenty-seven non-musicians participated in the study (age: 20 to 30 years). They were assessed for identification of consonant-vowel syllables (/da/ to /ga/), vowels (/u/ to /a/), vocal music note (/ri/ to /ga/), and instrumental music note (/ri/ to /ga/) across their respective stimulus continuum. The continua contained 15 tokens with equal step size between any adjacent tokens. The resultant identification scores were plotted against each token and were analyzed for presence of categorical boundary. If the categorical boundary was found, the plots were analyzed by six parameters of categorical perception; for the point of 50% crossover, lower edge of categorical boundary, upper edge of categorical boundary, phoneme boundary width, slope, and intercepts.ResultsOverall, the results showed that both speech and music are perceived differently in musicians and non-musicians. In musicians, both speech and music are categorically perceived, while in non-musicians, only speech is perceived categorically.ConclusionsThe findings of the present study indicate that music is perceived categorically by musicians, even if the stimulus is devoid of vocal tract features. The findings support that the categorical perception is strongly influenced by training and results are discussed in light of notions of motor theory of speech perception.

Early lexical influences on sublexical processing in speech perception: Evidence from electrophysiology

Contextual information influences how we perceive speech, but it remains unclear at which level of processing contextual information merges with acoustic information. Theories differ on whether early stages of speech processing, like sublexical processing during which articulatory features and portions of speech sounds are identified, are strictly feed-forward or are influenced by semantic and lexical context. In the current study, we investigate the time-course of lexical context effects on judgments about the individual sounds we perceive by recording electroencephalography as an online measure of speech processing while subjects engage in a lexically biasing phoneme categorization task. We find that lexical context modulates the amplitude of the N100, an ERP component linked with sublexical processes in speech perception. We demonstrate that these results can be modeled in an interactive speech perception model and are not well fit by any established feed-forward mechanisms of lexical bias. These results support interactive speech perception theories over feed-forward theories in which sublexical speech perception processes are only driven by bottom-up information.

Sentence perception in noise by hearing-aid users predicted by syllable-constituent perception and the use of context.

Masked sentence perception by hearing-aid users is strongly correlated with three variables: (1) the ability to hear phonetic details as estimated by the identification of syllable constituents in quiet or in noise; (2) the ability to use situational context that is extrinsic to the speech signal; and (3) the ability to use inherent context provided by the speech signal itself. This approach is called "the syllable-constituent, contextual theory of speech perception" and is supported by the performance of 57 hearing-aid users in the identification of 109 syllable constituents presented in a background of 12-talker babble and the identification of words in naturally spoken sentences presented in the same babble. A simple mathematical model, inspired in large part by Boothroyd and Nittrouer [(1988). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 101-114] and Fletcher [Allen (1996) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 1825-1834], predicts sentence perception from listeners' abilities to recognize isolated syllable constituents and to benefit from context. When the identification accuracy of syllable constituents is greater than about 55%, individual differences in context utilization play a minor role in determining the sentence scores. As syllable-constituent scores fall below 55%, individual differences in context utilization play an increasingly greater role in determining sentence scores. Implications for hearing-aid design goals and fitting procedures are discussed.

The dynamics of indexical information in speech: Can recognizability be controlled by the speaker?

Human voices are individual and humans have elaborate skills in recognizing speakers by their voice, phenomena that are deeply rooted in the evolution of human behavior. To date, the mechanisms of speaker recognition are not well understood because of the high variability of the acoustic cues to a speaker’s identity. We wondered what role the speaker plays in making his/her voice more or less well recognizable. While it is evident from the literature that humans can control vocal properties to enhance their intelligibility, it is unclear whether speakers can and/or do control vocal characteristics to be better recognizable and whether such control mechanisms play a role in the communication process. In this paper, we reviewed results from the literature supporting the view that speaker idiosyncratic information is dynamic and that humans have the ability to control how well they can be recognized. We suggest possible experimental setups by which the control over identity in voice can be tested and present pilot acoustic characteristics of speech that was produced to be either targeted at being (a) intelligible (clear speech) and (b) suitable for person recognition (identity marked speech). Results revealed that there is reason to believe that speakers apply different mechanisms when making their individuality identifiable as opposed to making their speech better understood. We discuss predictions that a control of recognizability and intelligibility has within major theories of speech perception.