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Tue-Ses2-P3:
Speech Perception II: Cross Language and Age
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: | Tuesday 13:30 | Place: | International Conference Room C | Type: | Poster |
| Chair: | Robert Port | ||||
| #1 | Speech Intelligibility of Diagonally Localized Speech with Competing Noise Using Bone-Conduction Headphones |
| (Yamagata University) (Tohoku University) (Yamagata University) (Tohoku University) | |
| We investigated the speech intelligibility differences of normal and bone-conduction stereo headphones of target speech localized at 45 degrees on the horizontal plane when competing noise is present. This was our effort to study the possible effect of crosstalk found in bone-conduction headphones on speech intelligibility. All sound sources were localized on the horizontal plane. Target speech was localized at 45 degrees diagonal relative to the listener, while the noise was localized at various azimuths and distances from the listener. The SNR was set to 0, -6, -12 [dB]. We found little difference in intelligibility by headphone types, suggesting that cross-talk in bone-conduction headphones have negligible effect on intelligibility. | |
| #2 | Masking of vowel-analog transitions by vowel-analog distracters |
| (VA Northern California Health Care System) | |
| Single-formant dynamically changing harmonic vowel analogs, a target with a single frequency excursion and a longer distracter with a different fundamental frequency and repeated excursions were generated to assess informational and energetic masking of target transitions in young and elderly listeners. Results indicate the presence of informational masking that is significant only for formant excursions of sub-phonemic changes. Elderly listeners perform similarly to the young, with the exception that they require a target/distracter ratio about 10 to 20 dB larger. | |
| #3 | 2010, a speech oddity: Phonetic transcription of reversed speech |
| (Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, CNRS – Université de Lyon, France) (CLILLAC-ARP - Université Paris 7, France) (Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, CNRS – Université de Lyon, France) | |
| Time reversal is often used in experimental studies on language perception and understanding, but little is known on its precise impact on speech sounds. Strikingly, some studies consider reversed speech chunks as “speech” stimuli lacking lexical information while others use them as “non speech” control conditions. The phonetic perception of reversed speech has not been thoroughly studied so far, and only impressionistic evaluation has been proposed. To fill this gap, we give here the results of a phonetic transcription task of time-reversed French pseudo-words by 4 expert phoneticians. Results show that for most phonemes (except unvoiced stops), several phonetic features are preserved by time reversal, leading to rather accurate transcriptions of reversed words. Other phenomena are also investigated, such as the emergence of epenthetic segments, and discussed with insight from the neurocognitive bases of the perception of time-varying sounds. | |
| #4 | Perception on Pitch Reset at Discourse Boundaries |
| (Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University) (Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University) | |
| This study investigates the role of pitch reset in discourse boundary perception. Previous production studies showed that pitch reset is a robust correlate of discourse boundaries. It not only signals boundary location, but also reflects boundary sizes. In this study, one aims to investigate how listeners perceive and utilize this cue for boundary detection. Results showed that listeners’ perception on this cue corresponded to the patterns found in speech production. What is more, evidence showed that what listeners rely on is the amount of reset, rather than the rest pitch height. | |
| #5 | Effect of spatial separation on speech-in-noise comprehension in dyslexic adults |
| (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage) (Stem-Cells and Brain Research Institute) (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage) | |
| This study tested the use of binaural cues in adult dyslexic listeners during speech-in-noise comprehension. Participants listened to words presented in three different noise-types (Babble-, Fluctuating- and Stationary-noise) in three different listening configurations: dichotic, monaural and binaural. In controls, we obtained an important informational masking in the monaural configuration mostly attributable to linguistic interferences. This was not observed with binaural noise, suggesting that this interference was suppressed by spatial separation. Dyslexic listeners showed a monaural deficit in Babble, but no deficit of the binaural processing, suggesting compensation based on the use of spatial cues. | |
| #6 | Speech categorization context effects in seven- to nine-month-old infants |
| (Stockholm University) (Stpckholm University) (Stockholm University) | |
| Adults have been shown to categorize an ambiguous syllable differently depending on which sound precedes it. The present paper reports preliminary results from an on-going experiment, investigating seven- to nine-month-olds on their sensitivity to non-speech contexts when perceiving an ambiguous syllable. The results suggest that the context effect is present already in infancy. Additional data is currently collected and results will be presented in full at the conference. | |
| #7 | Changes in Temporal Processing of Speech Across the Adult Lifespan |
| (Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) (Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) (Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) | |
| Speech is a rapidly varying signal. Temporal processing generally slows with age and many older adults experience difficulties in understanding speech. This research involved over 250 young, middle-aged and older listeners. Temporal processing abilities were assessed in numerous vowel sequence tasks, and analyses examined several factors that might contribute to performance. Significant factors included age and cognitive function as measured by the WAIS-III, but not hearing status for the audible vowels. In addition, learning effects were assessed by retesting two tasks. All groups significantly improved vowel temporal-order identification to a similar degree, but large differences in performance between groups were still observed. | |
| #8 | Fluency and Structural Complexity as Predictors of L2 Oral Proficiency |
| (Knowledge Technologies, Pearson) (Knowledge Technologies, Pearson) (Knowledge Technologies, Pearson) | |
| Automaticity and real-time aspects of performance are directly relevant to L2 spoken language proficiency. This paper analyzes data from L2 speakers of English and Spanish spread over a range of proficiency levels as identified by traditional holistic, rubric-based human ratings. In spontaneous speech samples from these L2 populations, we studied timed measures of spoken fluency (linguistic units per time) that co-vary with proficiency level and compared the timed measures to indices of the linguistic complexity of the same spoken material. Results indicate that duration-based fluency measures yield as much or more information about proficiency as do structural complexity measures. These empirical findings suggest that expert perception of oral proficiency relate to automatic, real-time aspects of speaking and that the oral proficiency construct may be enriched by adding timing to its communicative/functional framework. | |
| #9 | Semantic facilitation in bilingual everyday speech comprehension |
| (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) (University of Alberta, Canada) (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Nederlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) | |
| Previous research suggests that bilinguals presented with low and high predictability sentences benefit from semantics in clear but not in conversational speech [1]. In everyday speech, however, many words are not highly predictable. Previous research has shown that native listeners can use also more subtle semantic contextual information [2]. The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments investigating to what extent late Asian-English bilinguals benefit from subtle semantic cues in their processing of English unreduced and reduced speech. Our results indicate that these bilinguals are less sensitive to semantic cues than native listeners for both speech registers. | |
| #10 | L2 Experience and Non-Native Vowel Categorization of L1-Mandarin Speakers |
| (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan) (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan) | |
| This study investigates the effect of L2-English experience on the perception of the English tense-lax high vowel contrast. Experienced L1-Mandarin, inexperienced L1-Mandarin and L1-English listeners identified and discriminated synthetic heed-hid and who’d-hood continua varying in five steps of F1, F2, and F3 variations and seven steps of duration variations. The results show a strong reliance on formant variations by L1-English listeners; reliance on duration variations by the inexperienced L1-Mandarin listeners, and a more dominant reliance on formant cues than on duration cues by the experienced L1-Mandarin listeners. | |
| #11 | Cross-lingual talker discrimination |
| (Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh, UK) | |
| This paper describes a talker discrimination experiment in which native English listeners were presented with two sentences spoken by bilingual talkers (English/German and English/Finnish) and were asked to judge whether they thought the sentences were spoken by the same person or not. Equal amounts of cross-lingual and matched-language trials were presented. The experiments showed that listeners are able to complete this task well, they can discriminate between talkers significantly better than chance. However, listeners are significantly less accurate on cross-lingual talker trials than on matched-language pairs. No significant differences were found on this task between German and Finnish. Bias (B'') and Sensitivity (A') values are presented to analyse the listeners' behaviour in more detail. The results are promising for the evaluation of EMIME, a project covering speech-to-speech translation with speaker adaptation. | |
| #12 | Dajare is not the lowest form of wit |
| (E-Listening Laboratory) | |
| The Japanese form of word play called dajare was investigated in the light of the concurrent multiple word activation mechanism proposed for spoken-word recognition. Analyses of a dajare database revealed distinct types of punning strategies, each of which can be seen as reflecting the activation mechanism. In the present study spontaneous conversations, compiled from a live Tokyo radio talk show, provided the dajare evidence. These results in spontaneous Japanese again confirm the activation predictions, suggesting that dajare is not a low form of wit: instead, it is clever exploitation of the the natural availability of multiple words in spoken-word recognition. |
