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Mon-Ses2-O3:
Speech Perception I: Factors Influencing Perception
This is the final program for this session. For oral sessions, the timing on the left is the current presentation order, but this may still change, so please check at the conference itself.
| Time: | Monday 13:30 | Place: | 201B | Type: | Oral |
| Chair: | Diane Kewley-Port | ||||
| 13:30 | Detecting categorical perception in continuous discrimination data |
| (University of Amsterdam) (University of Amsterdam) | |
| We present a method for assessing categorical perception from continuous discrimination data. Until recently, categorical perception of speech has exclusively been measured by discrimination and identification experiments with a small number of repeatedly presented stimuli. Experiments by Rogers and Davis have shown that using non-repeating stimuli along a densely-sampled phonetic continuum yields a more reliable measure of categorization. However, no analysis method has been proposed that would preserve the continuous nature of the obtained discrimination data. In the present study, we describe a method of analysis that can be applied to continuous discrimination data without having to discretize the raw data at any time during the analysis. | |
| 13:50 | The interaction between stimulus range and the number of response categories in vowel perception |
| (Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam) (Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam) | |
| We investigate the influence of the stimulus range and the number of response categories on the location of perceptual boundaries. The F1 continuum between Spanish /i/ and /e/ was presented to Peruvian listeners in three ranges. Half of the listeners could classify the tokens as /i/ and /e/, the other half chose from the five Spanish vowels. A boundary shift between /i/ and /e/ was observed as a function of the stimulus range, which was larger when listeners were given only two response categories. These results are interpreted as an effect of listeners’ category expectations on speech perception. | |
| 14:10 | The Relation Between Pitch Perception Preference and Emotion Identification |
| (Tilburg University) (Tilburg University) (Tilburg University) | |
| In our study, we explore the effect of synthetic vs analytic listening mode on the identification of emotions. Numerous psychoacoustic studies have shown that listeners differ in how they process complex sounds; some listeners focus on the fundamental frequency while others attend to the higher harmonics. The difference appears to have a neurological basis, expressed in a leftward (for F0 listeners) or rightward (for spectral listeners) asymmetry of gray matter volume in the lateral Heschl's gyrus. In our experiment we found that spectral listeners performed better in an emotion judgment task, which is what we expected based on the fact that the processing of emotional prosody is relatively right-hemisphere lateralized. | |
| 14:30 | Competition in the Perception of Spoken Japanese Words |
| (E-Listening Laboratory) (Radboud University Nijmegen) (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) | |
| Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible with few competitors. This clear effect of competition, established here for preceding context in Japanese, joins similar demonstrations, in other languages and for following contexts, to underline that the functional architecture of the human spoken-word recognition system is a universal one. | |
| 14:50 | Influence of musical training on perception of L2 speech |
| (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) (Department of Psychology, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands) (Division of Cognitive Psychology, Kumamoto University, Japan) | |
| The current study reports specific cases in which a positive transfer of perceptual ability from the music domain to the language domain occurs. We tested whether musical training enhances discrimination and identification performance of L2 speech sounds (timing features, nasal consonants and vowels). Native Dutch and Japanese speakers with different musical training experience, matched for their estimated verbal IQ, participated in the experiments. Results indicated that musical training strongly increases one’s ability to perceive timing information in speech signals. We also found a benefit of musical training on discrimination performance for a subset of the tested vowel contrasts. | |
| 15:10 | Full body aero-tactile integration of speech perception |
| (Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada) (Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada AND Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut 06511-6695, USA) | |
| We follow up on our research demonstrating that aero- tactile information can enhance or interfere with accurate au- ditory perception, even among uninformed and untrained per- ceivers [1]. Mimicking aspiration, we applied slight, inaudi- ble air puffs on participants skin at the right ankles, simulta- neously with syllables beginning with aspirated (‘pa’, ‘ta’) and unsapirated (‘ba’, ‘da’) stops, dividing the participants into two groups, those with hairy, and those with hairless ankles. Since hair follicle endings (mechanoreceptors) are used to detect air turbulence [2] we expected, and observed, that syllables heard simultaneously with cutaneous air puffs would be more likely to be heard as aspirated, but only among those with hairy an- kles. These results demonstrate that information from any part of the body can be integrated in speech perception, but the stim- uli must be unambiguously relatable to the speech event in order to be integrated into speech perception. |
