Tessa Bent

This study investigated talker-dependent and talker-independent perceptual adaptation to foreign-accent English. Experiment 1 investigated talker-dependent adaptation by comparing native English listeners’ recognition accuracy for Chinese-accented English across single and multiple talker presentation conditions. Results showed that the native listeners adapted to the foreign-accented speech over the course of the single talker presentation condition with some variation in the rate and extent of this adaptation depending on the baseline sentence intelligibility of the foreign-accented talker. Experiment 2 investigated talker-independent perceptual adaptation to Chinese-accented English by exposing native English listeners to Chinese-accented English and then testing their perception of English produced by a novel Chinese-accented talker. Results showed that, if exposed to multiple talkers of Chinese-accented …

This study investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. Native talkers of Chinese (n=2), Korean (n=2), and English (n=1) were recorded reading simple English sentences. Native listeners of English (n=21), Chinese (n=21), Korean (n=10), and a mixed group from various native language backgrounds (n=12) then performed a sentence recognition task with the recordings from the five talkers. Results showed that for native English listeners, the native English talker was most intelligible. However, for non-native listeners, speech from a relatively high proficiency non-native talker from the same native language background was as intelligible as speech from a native talker, giving rise to the “matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.” Furthermore, this …

Previous work has established that naturally produced clear speech is more intelligible than conversational speech for adult hearing-impaired listeners and normal-hearing listeners under degraded listening conditions. The major goal of the present study was to investigate the extent to which naturally produced clear speech is an effective intelligibility enhancement strategy for non-native listeners. Thirty-two non-native and 32 native listeners were presented with naturally produced English sentences. Factors that varied were speaking style (conversational versus clear), signal-to-noise ratio (-4 versus -8 dB) and talker (one male versus one female). Results showed that while native listeners derived a substantial benefit from naturally produced clear speech (an improvement of about 16 rau units on a keyword-correct count), non-native listeners exhibited only a small clear speech effect (an improvement of only 5 rau …

Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /ɑ/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex. These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a pitch discrimination task requiring fine-grained discrimination of simple nonspeech sounds. The crucial finding was that cross-language differences emerged on a nonspeech pitch contour identification task: The Mandarin listeners more often misidentified flat and falling pitch contours than the English listeners in a manner that could be related to specific features of the sound structure of Mandarin, which suggests that the effect of linguistic experience extends to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task …

This study investigated the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. The word-final voicing contrast was considered (as in minimal pairs such as ‘cub’ and ‘cup’) in a forced-choice word identification task. For these particular talkers and listeners, there was evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (i.e., native Mandarin listeners were more accurate than native English listeners at identifying Mandarin-accented English words). However, there was no evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for talkers (i.e., native Mandarin listeners did not find Mandarin-accented English speech more intelligible than native English speech). When listener and talker phonological proficiency (operationalized as accentedness) was taken into account, it was found that the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for …

In pairs of names, male names often precede female names (eg Romeo and Juliet). We investigate this bias and argue that preferences for name ordering are constrained by a combination of gender, phonology, and frequency. First, various phonological constraints condition the optimal ordering of binomial pairs, and findings from our corpus investigations show that male names contain those features which lend them to be preferred in first position, while female names contain features which lend them to be preferred in second position. Thus, phonology predicts that male names are more likely to precede female names than follow them. Results from our name-ordering experiments provide further evidence that this “gendered phonology” plays a role in determining ordering preferences but also that an independent gender bias exists: when phonology is controlled (ie when two names are “phonologically equal …

2 prosodic categories influence the perception and production of a novel set of prosodic categories. That is, how does one deeply entrenched prosodic system influence a newly encountered system?Languages vary widely in their realizations of the multiple dimensions included in the prosodic system. These dimensions include lexical prosody, intonation or postlexical prosody, rhythmic structure, and the unit (s) which receive prosodic markers (Jun, 2005). This dissertation focuses on the dimensions of lexical prosody and intonation. The dimension of lexical prosody includes languages with either lexical tones, lexical stress, or pitch accent. The two languages under investigation, Mandarin and English, vary in their lexical prosody. Lexical tone languages, including Mandarin, have specified pitch patterns for each word. In lexical stress language like English, one syllable within each word will receive primary stress as marked by increased duration and amplitude. Furthermore, in English pitch accents can be associated with prominent words as determined by intonation. Intonation utilizes the dimensions of pitch, amplitude and duration to convey information about which words are stressed in the sentence and about the edges of prosodic units through the use of phrasal tones and/or boundary tones. All languages have intonation which interacts with the lexical prosody categories in the language. While some researchers only use the term prosody to refer to syllable structure, rhythm and phrasing and not intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1999), others include intonation (also called post-lexical prosody) within prosodic structure (Jun, 2005). Within this …

This study investigated talker-independent perceptual learning of a foreign accent by exposing native English listeners to Chinese-accented English and then testing their perception of English produced by a novel Chineseaccented talker. Training conditions involved exposure to either a single or multiple Chinese-accented talkers. Control conditions involved either no training or task training with native English talkers. A talker-specific training condition in which the training talker was the same as the Chinese-accented test talker was also included. Results showed better performance on the posttraining test with the Chinese-accented talker after both the single and multiple talker training conditions relative to the no-training control. However, test performance following single talker training was equivalent to post-test performance following the task training condition (training with native English talkers), demonstrating a strong task familiarity effect. Performance following the multiple talker training was significantly better than following either the single talker or the task training conditions, and was equivalent to performance following the talkerspecific training. These findings suggest that, with exposure to sufficient variability, listeners can develop highly generalized cognitive representations of Chineseaccented speech.

Speech produced by non-native talkers deviates from native talker norms in systematic ways that reflect the interaction between the talker's native language and the target language. These deviations result in speech that is almost always easily identified by native listeners as" foreign-accented" and that is typically less intelligible for native listeners than native-accented speech. Determining the contribution of various types of foreign-accented speech features to reductions in intelligibility for native listeners can help advance our understanding of the nature of native and target language sound structure interactions in relation to their consequences for speech communication This study related variability in segmental production accuracy of foreign-accented speech to variability in overall intelligibility across individual talkers of foreign-accented English who all came from the same native language background, but varied in their levels of English speech production proficiency. The results showed that vowel, but not consonant, production accuracy correlates with intelligibility; and, errors in word-initial position are more detrimental to intelligibility than errors in other positions. These findings provide the basis for a principled and detailed description of the phonetic nature of foreign-accented speech in relation to its communicative function.

The acoustic-phonetic realizations of words can vary dramatically depending on a variety of within- and across-talker characteristics such as regional dialect, native language, age, and gender. Robust word learning requires that children are able to recognize words amidst this substantial variability. In the current study, perception of foreign-accented words was assessed in four- to seven-year-old children to test how one form of variability influences word recognition in children. Results demonstrated that children had less accurate word recognition than adults for both native- and foreign-accented words. Both adults and children were less accurate at identifying foreign-accented words compared to native-accented words with children and adults showing similar decrements. For children, age and lexicon size contributed to accurate word recognition.

Two experiments examined production and perception of English temporal patterns by native and non-native participants. Experiment 1 indicated that native and non-native (L1 = Chinese) talkers differed significantly in their production of one English duration pattern (i.e., vowel lengthening before voiced versus voice-less consonants) but not another (i.e., tense versus lax vowels). Experiment 2 tested native and non-native listener identification of words that differed in voicing of the final consonant by the native and non-native talkers whose productions were substantially different in experiment 1. Results indicated that differences in native and non-native intelligibility may be partially explained by temporal pat-tern differences in vowel duration although other cues such as presence of stop releases and burst duration may also contribute. Additionally, speech intelligibility depends on shared phonetic knowledge …

Several temporal features of English were examined to determine the extent of their occurrence in the speech of talkers of Chinese-accented English who had relatively limited experience with spoken English. Data from sentences produced by ten non-native and ten native talkers indicated that the two groups did not differ significantly in the extent to which they realized the inherent duration difference between tense and lax vowels or for syllable-final vowel lengthening. Although the group of native English speakers showed substantially greater vowel lengthening before voiced versus before voiceless consonants than the Chinese-accented group, certain individual, non-native speakers did show patterns reasonably similar to those of native speakers. In order to investigate the perceptual consequences of these observations, a follow-up study was designed with a focus on the vowel duration difference before voiced versus voiceless consonants. This investigation tested the abilities of native and non-native listeners to identify words produced by native English-speaking subjects and by Chinese-accented talkers who exhibited varying amounts of vowel lengthening before voiced versus voiceless consonants, in order to assess the impact of this temporal parameter on intelligibility.

A listener’s ability to utilize indexical information in the speech signal can enhance their performance on a variety of speech perception tasks. It is unclear, however, whether such information plays a similar role for spectrally reduced speech signals, such as those experienced by individuals with cochlear implants. The present study compared the effects of training on linguistic and indexical tasks when adapting to cochlear implant simulations. Listening to sentences processed with an eight-channel sinewave vocoder, three separate groups of subjects were trained on a transcription task (transcription), a talker identification task (talker ID), or a gender identification task (gender ID). Pre- to posttest comparisons demonstrated that training produced significant improvement for all groups. Moreover, subjects from the talker ID and transcription training groups performed similarly at posttest and generalization, and …

Talker intelligibility and perceptual adaptation under cochlear implant (CI)-simulation and speech in multi-talker babble were compared. The stimuli consisted of 100 sentences produced by 20 native English talkers. The sentences were processed to simulate listening with an eight-channel CI or were mixed with multi-talker babble. Stimuli were presented to 400 listeners in a sentence transcription task (200 listeners in each condition). Perceptual adaptation was measured for each talker by comparing intelligibility in the first 20 sentences of the experiment to intelligibility in the last 20 sentences. Perceptual adaptation patterns were also compared across the two degradation conditions by comparing performance in blocks of ten sentences. The most intelligible talkers under CI-simulation also tended to be the most intelligible talkers in multi-talker babble. Furthermore, listeners demonstrated a greater degree of …