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PubMed1977

Some aspects of the psychological representation of speech sounds.

If one listens to a meaningless syllable that is repeated over and over, he will hear it undergo a variety of changes that can be described systematically in terms of reorganization of the phones constituting the syllable and changes in a restricted set of phonetic distinctive features. When the repeated syllable is followed by a different syllable but in the same voice, the new (test) syllable will be misperceived in a manner related to the perceptual misrepresentation of the repeated syllable. In the present experiment subjects (N = 24) listened to 72 different experimental sequences of repeated syllables in a male voice followed by test syllables in a female voice. Identification of penultimate and test syllables was independent and in no instance were the phone constituting the syllables reorganized. These results are interpreted as evidence against both auditory and phonetic feature detector theories of speech perception.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1985

Verbal asymmetries and levels of processing in an interactive dual-task paradigm.

This study examined how the dual-task laterality paradigm produces patterns of cerebral asymmetry different from those obtained in studies of comparable single-laterality tasks. We systematically examined at what level of processing a concurrent verbal memory-load influences accuracy of recognition of laterally presented nouns relative to that in a control condition. Four groups of 20 subjects each were tested in an interactive dual-task paradigm requiring them to compare lateralized nouns directly with one of three nouns concurrently held in memory prior to accuracy of recognition. The groups differed according to the types of comparisons being made: physical identity, phonetic orthographic similarity, phonetic similarity using non-orthographic words, and category membership. Subjects in each group carried out three tasks. They were required to determine if a specified match had occurred between a memory-load word and the lateralized word, identify the lateralized word, and report the memory-load words. Another 20 subjects were assigned to a control laterality condition in which no concurrent memory-load was used. Control subjects were required to respond to a laterally presented word by pressing a reaction-time key to indicate recognition of the word and then to report the word. No significant visual-field differences occurred in accuracy of recognition for either the control or matching-task groups. However, reaction-time latencies and errors increased as a function of the level of processing. The accuracy of recognition did not support the predictions of Kinsbourne's attentional model but the reaction times provided some support for the concept of selective left-hemisphere interference proposed by Hellige. A limited-capacity approach was suggested as a possible alternative explanation of laterality effects.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Identification of a speaker's sex: a study of vowels.

An experiment was carried out to test whether three phonetically naive listeners were able to identify a speaker's sex from brief natural vowel segments. All speech segments presented to the listeners were extracted from sentences spoken by members of a group of three women and three men with a British General Northern accent. Analysis showed that listeners were able to identify the speaker's sex from the vowel segments with high accuracy (a mean score of 98.9%, p < .001). Acoustic analyses were subsequently carried out to quantify the acoustic and phonetic differences related to the sex of the speakers. Fundamental frequencies and format frequencies of the vowel stimuli were investigated. The men generally had lower values of both than the women.

Discrimination, Psychological↗
PubMed1998

Identification of a speaker's sex: a fricative study.

An experiment was carried out to test whether three phonetically naive listeners were able to identify the speaker's sex from brief (30 msec. to 100 msec.) voiceless fricative segments. All speech segments were extracted from sentences spoken by members of a group of 3 women and 3 men with a British General Northern accent. The consonant segments were significantly identified by the listeners with an accuracy of 64.4%. A sample of the fricative segments was chosen to investigate acoustic and phonetic differences related to a speaker's sex, using spectrographic analysis. Analysis showed that on the average the frication of the women's voiceless fricatives was significantly higher in frequency than that of the men.

Discrimination, Psychological↗
PubMed1999

A comment on women's speech and its synthesis.

A brief update of sex differences in voice characteristics points to the style and linguistic convention in residual differences after processes of normalisation in phonetic studies and phonetic realizations in read speech as these affect speech synthesis.

Communication Devices for People with Disabilities↗
PubMed2000

Training in lingual awareness during production of isolated syllables of English.

The purpose of this preliminary investigation was to determine the effects of training on lingual awareness during the production of isolated syllables of English. 60 subjects were selected for this investigation. They were placed into two groups of 30 individuals each. Group one (Trained) consisted of individuals who had received training in articulation and phonetics (M age=22.7) Group two (Untrained) consisted of individuals who had not received training in articulation and phonetics (M age= 18.8). The subjects in the Trained group were majors in speech-language pathology. The procedure involved asking subjects to imitate the production of a syllable, then describe where the tongue was located during that production. Following this request, subjects were given four multiple-choice questions to answer regarding (a) tongue height (high to low), (b) tongue position (front to back), (c) contact with the teeth, and (d) contact with other structures within the oral cavity. Mean scores ranged from 1.87 to 3.2 (on a scale of 4.0) for the group of Trained subjects versus 1.5 to 2.4 for the Untrained subjects. The Trained subjects had significantly higher test scores on all phonemes (p<.05) with the exception of r and sh (p>.05). For both groups of subjects, the phonemes, r, sh, and l, were the most difficult to describe, while the phoneme t was described most accurately.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Relationship between phonemic and lingual awareness.

The purpose of this preliminary investigation was to assess the relationship between knowledge of speech sounds (phonemes) and lingual awareness in normal adult speakers of English. The study also examined subjects' descriptions of lingual contact. 36 subjects (M age=19.6, SD=.71) who were enrolled in an undergraduate phonetics class participated. All passed a speech and hearing screening and reported having received no prior speech therapy or classes in articulation, phonetics, or speech science. During the first class meeting, the subjects were given two tests. The measure of phonemic awareness consisted of (a) judging which two (out of three) printed words began (or ended) with the same phoneme, (b) counting, substituting, reversing phonemes in words, and (c) indicating primary stress in two-syllable words. The lingual awareness test consisted of subjects imitating a syllable, then responding to a multiple-choice question regarding (a) tongue position (front to back), (b) tongue height (high to low), (c) contact with the teeth, and (d) contact with other oral cavity structures. Subjects were requested to imitate the syllable prior to answering each question, e.g., "Say tuh. Did you feel your tongue in the front, middle, or back of your mouth?" Seven English phonemes (t, k, s, sh, r, l, and voiceless th) were presented in a consonant-vowel syllable with the central vowel "uh." Subjects were aided by a line drawing of the oral cavity. A significant correlation of .53 was found between the two tests, suggesting that individuals who possess greater awareness of speech sounds tend to exhibit heightened lingual awareness. Sound-symbol knowledge was the best predictor of lingual awareness. Subjects had the most difficulty describing lingual contact for phonemes that are often troublesome for children to articulate (sh, r, l, and s).

Adolescent↗
PubMed1980

Influence of the speaker and other factors affecting speech intelligibility.

20 phonetically balanced word lists comprising 25 words in each and recorded on tape by a professional announcer have been tested on 45 subjects. Analysis of the results has enabled each of the 500 words to be assigned a grade of difficulty within the range 1-35. 25 'difficult' and 25 'easy' words re-recorded from the original tapes to form two new lists have been shown to retain their same grade of difficulty. With the same lists recorded by two additional speakers, however, word order difficulty was dramatically altered. Consideration has been given to various factors likely to affect word intelligibility including phonetic construction, word familiarity and word environment. None appeared to exert any marked influence. It is concluded that the characteristics of any recorded word articulation material are determined predominantly by the speaker and the recording technique adopted and are largely independent of other factors. Given sufficient experimental data upon recorded material, words can be selected out of context and re-recorded to provide test lists with virtually any desired characteristics.

Audiometry, Speech↗
PubMed1988

Effects of lateralized presentation on levels of processing in memory.

The present study utilized lateralized presentation of words in a level-of-processing paradigm. Eighty words were presented to subjects in four level-of-processing conditions: orthographic, phonetic, syntactic and semantic. Words were presented either to the left or right visual fields (Experiments 1 and 2), or centrally (Experiment 3). Both free recall and recognition retrieval conditions were utilized. There were no visual field differences in the recognition condition. In the free recall condition, there was an interaction between visual field of presentation and level of processing. Recall was greatest for phonetically and semantically processed words which had been presented to the right visual field. A left visual field advantage was found for syntactically processed words. Results are interpreted in the context of retrieval strategies and hemisphere-linked processing capacities.

Functional Laterality↗
PubMed1994

Prosodic deviation in dysarthria: a case study.

Traditionally, prosodic difficulties in dysarthria have been described in phonetic terms with little attention being paid to the phonological implications of these impairments. This cast study attempts to illustrate the need for a phonological level of analysis. The speech of a 30-year-old ataxic dysarthric is analysed using Crystal's framework and the patterns are discussed in terms of the effect of the phonetic difficulties on the speaker's ability to use his intonation system to mark meaning contrasts. The analysis reveals that this speaker has developed a personal subsystem where he retains some of the features of 'normal' speech and systematically exploits variables still under his control to compensate for other deficits. This study highlights both the value of considering phonological aspects in the analysis of disordered prosody and the need for careful assessment of the appropriacy of the compensatory strategies that have been developed.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Exploring the role of attention during memory retrieval: effects of semantic encoding and divided attention.

Research on attention and memory suggests that semantic encoding leads to retrieval that is highly susceptible to divided attention. Three experiments tested this proposition and showed that dividing attention did not selectively affect semantically encoded items. Participants encoded a list of words in one of two ways: semantically or phonetically. Later, memory was assessed using either a standard recognition test (Experiment 1) or a rhyme recognition test (Experiments 2 and 3). The participants took the memory test either alone (full attention) or while simultaneously performing a secondary task (divided attention). Recognition accuracy was reduced by divided attention on both recognition tests, and semantically and phonetically encoded words were equally affected.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Learning artificial orthographies: further evidence of a nonanalytic acquisition procedure.

Previous research (Byrne, 1984) showed that adults who learned to read an orthography representing phonetic features (voicing, place of articulation) did not readily obtain usable knowledge of the mapping of phonetic features onto orthographic elements, as evidenced by failure to generalize to partially new stimuli. The present Experiment 1 used a different method of detecting learning savings during acquisition. Subjects learned a set of complex symbols standing for phones, with the elements representing voicing and place. In a second acquisition set, the signs for voicing were reversed. Learning speed was not affected, which was consistent with the claim that feature-element links went unnoticed in initial acquisition. In Experiment 2, some subjects were instructed to "find the rule" embodied in the orthography. None did, and acquisition rates were no different from those of uninstructed subjects. In Experiment 3, subjects had 4 h of training on the orthography, with consistent feature-symbol mapping for half of the subjects and arbitrary pairings for the remainder. No reaction time advantage emerged in the consistent condition, which is further evidence of nonanalytic acquisition. The results are related to data from children learning to read.

Cues↗
PubMed1993

Detecting phonemes and letters in text: interactions between different types and levels of processes.

In six experiments, subjects detected phonemes or letters in text presented auditorily or visually. Experiments 1 and 2 provided support for the hypothesis that a mismatch between the phoneme and letter representations of a target leads to detection errors. In addition, visual word unitization processes were implicated. Experiments 3 and 4 provided support for the hypothesis that the Gestalt goodness of pattern affected detection errors when subjects searched for letters. Experiments 5 and 6 demonstrated that the effects of unitization on the detection of letters in common words were decreased by altering the familiar configuration of the test words. The combined results of all six experiments lead to the conclusion that both visual and phonetic processes influence letter detection, that these processes communicate through a type of cross-checking, and that there are at least two levels of visual (and perhaps of phonetic) processing involved in the letter detection task.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1991

Integrating speech information across talkers, gender, and sensory modality: female faces and male voices in the McGurk effect.

Studies of the McGurk effect have shown that when discrepant phonetic information is delivered to the auditory and visual modalities, the information is combined into a new percept not originally presented to either modality. In typical experiments, the auditory and visual speech signals are generated by the same talker. The present experiment examined whether a discrepancy in the gender of the talker between the auditory and visual signals would influence the magnitude of the McGurk effect. A male talker's voice was dubbed onto a videotape containing a female talker's face, and vice versa. The gender-incongruent videotapes were compared with gender-congruent videotapes, in which a male talker's voice was dubbed onto a male face and a female talker's voice was dubbed onto a female face. Even though there was a clear incompatibility in talker characteristics between the auditory and visual signals on the incongruent videotapes, the resulting magnitude of the McGurk effect was not significantly different for the incongruent as opposed to the congruent videotapes. The results indicate that the mechanism for integrating speech information from the auditory and the visual modalities is not disrupted by a gender incompatibility even when it is perceptually apparent. The findings are compatible with the theoretical notion that information about voice characteristics of the talker is extracted and used to normalize the speech signal at an early stage of phonetic processing, prior to the integration of the auditory and the visual information.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Stimulus variability and processing dependencies in speech perception.

Processing dependencies in speech perception between voice and phoneme were investigated using the Garner (1974) speeded classification procedure. Variability in the voice of the talker and in the cues to word-initial consonants were manipulated. The results showed that the processing of a talker's voice and the perception of voicing are asymmetrically dependent. In addition, when stimulus variability was increased in each dimension, the amount of orthogonal interference obtained for each dimension became significantly larger. The processing asymmetry between voice and phoneme was interpreted in terms of a parallel-contingent relationship of talker normalization processes to auditory-to-phonetic coding processes. The processing of voice information appears to be qualitatively different from the encoding of segmental phonetic information, although they are not independent. Implications of these results for current theories of speech perception are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Depth of phonological recoding in short-term memory.

In testing the hypothesis that surface phonetic form is included in short-term memory (STM) representation, the tone sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese was exploited, and, as a prerequisite, the hypothesis that tonal similarity affects STM of verbal material in a tone language was also tested. In Experiment 1, subjects recalled visually presented sequences of seven monosyllabic Chinese morphemes having either the same tone or different tones. More errors were made on the monotonal sequences than on the multitonal sequences, confirming the effect of tonal similarity on STM. In Experiment 2, subjects recalled visually presented sequences of disyllabic nonsense words. The sequences were designed in such a way that half of them were subject to the tone sandhi rule in Mandarin Chinese, whereas the other half were not. The consequence of applying the tone sandhi rule, as designed, was to make all the first characters in the sequences identical in pronunciation, thus creating potential phonological confusion. More errors, indeed, occurred on the sequences subject to the tone sandhi rule than on those not subject to it, indicating the existence of a surface phonetic representation in STM. The findings in this study provide further insight into the phonological mechanism of STM. Different accounts for this mechanism are also discussed in the light of the new findings.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Human adults and human infants show a "perceptual magnet effect" for the prototypes of speech categories, monkeys do not.

Many perceptual categories exhibit internal structure in which category prototypes play an important role. In the four experiments reported here, the internal structure of phonetic categories was explored in studies involving adults, infants, and monkeys. In Experiment 1, adults rated the category goodness of 64 variants of the vowel i parallel on a scale from 1 to 7. The results showed that there was a certain location in vowel space where listeners rated the i parallel vowels as best instances, or prototypes. The perceived goodness of i parallel vowels declined systematically as stimuli were further removed from the prototypic i parallel vowel. Experiment 2 went beyond this initial demonstration and examined the effect of speech prototypes on perception. Either the prototypic or a nonprototypic i parallel vowels was used as the referent stimulus and adults' generalization to other members of the category was examined. Results showed that the typicality of the speech stimulus strongly affected perception. When the prototype of the category served as the referent vowel, there was significantly greater generalization to other i parallel vowels, relative to the situation in which the nonprototype served as the referent. The notion of a perceptual magnet was introduced. The prototype of the category functioned like a perceptual magnet for other category members; it assimilated neighboring stimuli, effectively pulling them toward the prototype. In Experiment 3, the ontogenetic origins of the perceptual magnet effect were explored by testing 6-month-old infants. The results showed that infants' perception of vowels was also strongly affected by speech prototypes. Infants showed significantly greater generalization when the prototype of the vowel category served as the referent; moreover, their responses were highly correlated with those of adults. In Experiment 4, Rhesus monkeys were tested to examine whether or not the prototype's magnet effect was unique to humans. The animals did not provide any evidence of speech prototypes; they did not exhibit the magnet effect. It is suggested that the internal organization of phonetic categories around prototypic members is an ontogenetically early, species-specific, aspect of the speech code.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Neural dynamics of perceptual order and context effects for variable-rate speech syllables.

How does the brain extract invariant properties of variable-rate speech? A neural model, called PHONET, is developed to explain aspects of this process and, along the way, data about perceptual context effects. For example, in consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, such as /ba/ and /wa/, an increase in the duration of the vowel can cause a switch in the percept of the preceding consonant from /w/ to /b/ (J.L. Miller & Liberman, 1979). The frequency extent of the initial formant transitions of fixed duration also influences the percept (Schwab, Sawusch, & Nusbaum, 1981). PHONET quantitatively simulates over 98% of the variance in these data, using a single set of parameters. The model also qualitatively explains many data about other perceptual context effects. In the model, C and V inputs are filtered by parallel auditory streams that respond preferentially to the transient and sustained properties of the acoustic signal before being stored in parallel working memories. A lateral inhibitory network of onset- and rate-sensitive cells in the transient channel extracts measures of frequency transition rate and extent. Greater activation of the transient stream can increase the processing rate in the sustained stream via a cross-stream automatic gain control interaction. The stored activities across these gain-controlled working memories provide a basis for rate-invariant perception, since the transient-to-sustained gain control tends to preserve the relative activities across the transient and sustained working memories as speech rate changes. Comparisons with alternative models tested suggest that the fit cannot be attributed to the simplicity of the data. Brain analogues of model cell types are described.

Attention↗