•Nonnative comprehension advantage for nonnative listeners over native listeners.•Nonnative comprehension advantage for nonnative speech over native speech.•Gradience in ISIB-L and -T effects ...modulated by speaker and listener proficiency.•Benefit for common- over unique-phoneme words for strongly accented speech.
Previous research on the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB) indicates nonnative listeners may have an advantage at understanding nonnative speech of talkers with the same first language (L1) due to shared interlanguage knowledge. The present study offers a comprehensive analysis of various factors that may modulate this advantage, including the proficiency of both the listeners and the talkers, the mapping of phonemes between the L1 and second language (L2), and the acoustic properties of the phones. Accuracy scores on a lexical decision task were used to investigate both native English listeners’ and native Mandarin learners’ of English perception of native English and Mandarin-accented English speech. Results show clear ISIB-L and ISIB-T effects and demonstrate the dynamic nature of ISIB effects, with both being modulated by speaker and listener proficiency. More striking ISIB effects typically occur at the most extreme ends of accentedness. Additionally, an advantage for common-phoneme over unique-phoneme words in nonnative speech was observed. While nonnative productions of common-phoneme words are more accurate than those of unique-phoneme words, for the most accented productions, nonnative listeners are faster to respond to these unique, often mispronounced, productions.
The nonnative listener advantage at perceiving nonnative speech depends on various factors, including listener proficiency, speaker proficiency, phoneme characteristics, and the acoustics of specific speech tokens.
Expectation, or prediction, has become a major theme in cognitive science. Music offers a powerful system for studying how expectations are formed and deployed in the processing of richly structured ...sequences that unfold rapidly in time. We ask to what extent expectations about an upcoming note in a melody are driven by two distinct factors: Gestalt-like principles grounded in the auditory system (e.g.a preference for subsequent notes to move in small intervals), and statistical learning of melodic structure. We use multinomial regression modeling to evaluate the predictions of computationally implemented models of melodic expectation against behavioral data from a musical cloze task, in which participants hear a novel melodic opening and are asked to sing the note they expect to come next. We demonstrate that both Gestalt-like principles and statistical learning contribute to listeners’ online expectations. In conjunction with results in the domain of language, our results point to a larger-than-previously-assumed role for statistical learning in predictive processing across cognitive domains, even in cases that seem potentially governed by a smaller set of theoretically motivated rules. However, we also find that both of the models tested here leave much variance in the human data unexplained, pointing to a need for models of melodic expectation that incorporate underlying hierarchical and/or harmonic structure. We propose that our combined behavioral (melodic cloze) and modeling (multinomial regression) approach provides a powerful method for further testing and development of models of melodic expectation.
Inadequate Top-Down Information and Vowel Judgement Zuraiq, Wael M.S.; Al-Omari, Moh’d A.; Abu-Joudeh, Maisoun I. ...
Journal of language teaching and research,
07/2023, Volume:
14, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The current study evaluates the accountability of Native Listeners (NLs). The study recruited speakers from a mixture of Arabic dialects and accents as one group and LAFL as another group where both ...groups spoke actual Arabic words with long and short vowels in contrast. A main consequence of choosing the present experimental manipulation is the outcome that NLs of Arabic had increasingly slow right recognitions in the follow-on test. The conclusion of the present experimental manipulation supports the claim that the handling of words is delayed if data accessible to NLs is incomplete. Additionally, this experimental manipulation adds to our awareness of the accountability of the NLs themselves towards LAFL. The study is expected to assist in considering the accountability of listeners in the communication barrier as explained by the inadequate top-down processing.
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies ...cross-linguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners' reference resolution, as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Collaborative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners' real-time incremental processing and reference identification. We apply the ICE framework to physical reference, showing that listeners construct expressions designed to minimize listeners' expected visual search effort during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers' propensity to over-specify. Moreover, the ICE model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that physical reference production is best understood as driven by a collaborative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length.
There have been widely exposed researches that analyze accented and intelligible speech of foreign language; yet, the study concerning listeners' awareness of the pronunciation errors is hardly ...found. Therefore, the current study aims to find out segmental features and the source of errors that have caused unintelligible speech of Indonesian-accented speech and describe the listeners' awareness of the errors. This descriptive qualitative research investigates listeners' transcripts of Indonesian-accented speeches through purposive sampling. The standard orthography transcripts are then transformed into phonemic transcripts. They are analyzed by error analysis based on phonological operation by Davenport and Hannahs. The result is further checked by the listeners to generate their awareness of the errors through interviews. There are consonants causing unintelligibility more than vowels. Furthermore, it is found that there are six pronunciation features affecting listeners' awareness of speakers' pronunciation errors: 1) aspiration, 2) spelling system, 3) blended phonemes, 4) absent phonemes, 5) different articulation, and 6) homophone in the research.
High variability training has been shown to benefit the learning of new face identities. In three experiments, we investigated whether this is also the case for voice identity learning. In Experiment ...1a, we contrasted high variability training sets – which included stimuli extracted from a number of different recording sessions, speaking environments and speaking styles – with low variability stimulus sets that only included a single speaking style (read speech) extracted from one recording session (see Ritchie & Burton, 2017 for faces). Listeners were tested on an old/new recognition task using read sentences (i.e. test materials fully overlapped with the low variability training stimuli) and we found a high variability disadvantage. In Experiment 1b, listeners were trained in a similar way, however, now there was no overlap in speaking style or recording session between training sets and test stimuli. Here, we found a high variability advantage. In Experiment 2, variability was manipulated in terms of the number of unique items as opposed to number of unique speaking styles. Here, we contrasted the high variability training sets used in Experiment 1a with low variability training sets that included the same breadth of styles, but fewer unique items; instead, individual items were repeated (see Murphy, Ipser, Gaigg, & Cook, 2015 for faces). We found only weak evidence for a high variability advantage, which could be explained by stimulus-specific effects. We propose that high variability advantages may be particularly pronounced when listeners are required to generalise from trained stimuli to different-sounding, previously unheard stimuli. We discuss these findings in the context of mechanisms thought to underpin advantages for high variability training.
Research has investigated psychological processes in an attempt to explain how and why people appreciate music. Three programs of research have shed light on these processes. The first focuses on the ...appreciation of musical structure. The second investigates self-oriented responses to music, including music-evoked autobiographical memories, the reinforcement of a sense of self, and benefits to individual health and wellbeing. The third seeks to explain how music listeners become sensitive to the causal and contextual sources of music making, including the biomechanics of performance, knowledge of musicians and their intentions, and the cultural and historical context of music making. To date, these programs of research have been carried out with little interaction, and the third program has been omitted from most psychological enquiries into music appreciation. In this paper, we review evidence for these three forms of appreciation. The evidence reviewed acknowledges the enormous diversity in antecedents and causes of music appreciation across contexts, individuals, cultures, and historical periods. We identify the inputs and outputs of appreciation, propose processes that influence the forms that appreciation can take, and make predictions for future research. Evidence for source sensitivity is emphasized because the topic has been largely unacknowledged in previous discussions. This evidence implicates a set of unexplored processes that bring to mind causal and contextual details associated with music, and that shape our appreciation of music in important ways.
Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown ...across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select the novel one? Or is the effect, at least in early childhood, simply based on an attraction to novelty and a direct mapping of the novel label to a novel object? In a preregistered online study with 2- to 3-year-olds (n = 75) and adults (n = 112), we examined (a) whether relative object novelty alone (without pragmatic or lexical information) could account for participants' disambiguation and (b) whether participants' decision processes involved reasoning by exclusion. Participants encountered either a known and an unknown object (classic ME condition) or two unknown objects, one completely novel and one preexposed (novelty condition) as potential referents of a novel label. Reasoning by exclusion was assessed by children's looking patterns and adults' explanations. In the classic ME condition, children and adults significantly chose the novel object and both used reasoning by exclusion. In contrast, in the novelty condition, children and adults chose randomly. Across conditions, a retention test revealed that adults remembered their prior selections, while children's performance was fragile. These results suggest that referent disambiguation is not based on relative object novelty alone. Instead, to resolve referential ambiguity, both young children and adults seem to make use of pragmatic and/or lexical sources of information and to engage in reasoning by exclusion strategies.
Public Significance StatementFrom early on, children seem to find the referents of novel words with relative ease. This study found that young toddlers' success is not driven by a simple attraction to the novelty of certain referents. Instead, they seem to use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge, in combination with their logical reasoning abilities, to exclude unlikely referents of novel words.
Fundamental frequency ( fo) is the most perceptually salient vocal acoustic parameter, yet little is known about how its perceptual influence varies across societies. We examined how fo affects key ...social perceptions and how socioecological variables modulate these effects in 2,647 adult listeners sampled from 44 locations across 22 nations. Low male fo increased men’s perceptions of formidability and prestige, especially in societies with higher homicide rates and greater relational mobility in which male intrasexual competition may be more intense and rapid identification of high-status competitors may be exigent. High female fo increased women’s perceptions of flirtatiousness where relational mobility was lower and threats to mating relationships may be greater. These results indicate that the influence of fo on social perceptions depends on socioecological variables, including those related to competition for status and mates.
•Rise of globalization is increasing the demand for standardized foreign language tests.•Current standardized tests may not be conducted in standardized environments.•Significant differences in STI ...and RT were found between actual test rooms.•Reverberation time may be a simple, reliable tool for test room selection.
Today, millions of standardized English as a foreign language proficiency tests are administered globally each year. A large portion of this is conducted as a paper-based test in which the listening section is commonly delivered through loudspeakers to groups of test takers, a method in which the audio signals are exposed to the acoustic tendencies of each particular venue. As it is well-established in the literature that non-native listeners are more susceptible to adverse listening conditions compared to their native counterparts, there is a need for an objective examination of the acoustic quality of such environments. This study examined the speech transmission index for public address systems (STIPA) for three types of sound sources (wall-mounted speakers, radio cassette player, and amplified speaker) and reverberation time (RT) in 10 unoccupied classrooms commonly used as test rooms at a university in Japan. The results revealed that STI was found to be statistically significantly different for the amplified speaker compared to both or one other sound source in eight out of 10 rooms. The amplified speaker also recorded the highest STI among the three sound sources in eight out of 10 rooms and the most rooms with STI entirely above 0.66, a minimum target value prescribed in IEC 60268–16:2020 as exhibiting high speech intelligibility. Additionally, ≥ 0.66 STI was consistently observed in rooms with RT0.5-2kHz≤ 0.7 s. Further observations are discussed to better understand the current conditions under which these tests are administered
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