Categorial discrimination of vowels produced in syllable context and in isolation

Gottfried, Terry L.; Jenkins, James J.; Strange, Winifred

doi:10.3758/bf03329794

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…The/•o/confusions have been identified as frequent vowel errors in other studies (e.g.,Gottfried et al, 1985 ). What is interesting in the present result is that these confusions were made by subjects in all four groups and that the number of these errors was not greatly different for the three conditions.…”

supporting

confidence: 55%

Identification of vowels in quiet, noise, and reverberation: Relationships with age and hearing loss

Nábělek

1988

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Vowel identification in quiet, noise, and reverberation was tested with 40 subjects who varied in age and hearing level. Stimuli were 15 English vowels spoken in a (b-t) context in a carrier sentence, which were degraded by reverberation or noise (a babble of 12 voices). Vowel identification scores were correlated with various measures of hearing loss and with age. The mean of four hearing levels at 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz, termed HTL4, produced the highest correlation coefficients in all three listening conditions. The correlation with age was smaller than with HTL4 and significant only for the degraded vowels. Further analyses were performed for subjects assigned to four groups on the basis of the amount of hearing loss. In noise, performance of all four groups was significantly different, whereas, in both quiet and reverberation, only the group with the greatest hearing loss performed differently from the other groups. The relationship among hearing loss, age, and number and type of errors is discussed in light of acoustic cues available for vowel identification.

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supporting

confidence: 55%

Identification of vowels in quiet, noise, and reverberation: Relationships with age and hearing loss

Nábělek

1988

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…In the categorial discrimination task used here (Flege, MacKay et al, 1999;Gottfried, Jenkins, & Strange, 1985), the three stimuli presented in each triad were always physically different tokens, each spoken by a different native English speaker. A total of 24 triads were used to test each of the three vowel contrasts.…”

Section: Vowel Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child—Adult Differences in Second-Language Phonological Learning: The Role of Cross-Language Similarity

et al. 2008

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This study evaluated whether age effects on second language (L2) speech learning derive from changes in how the native language (L1) and L2 sound systems interact. According to the "interaction hypothesis" (IH), the older the L2 learner, the less likely the learner is able to establish new vowel categories needed for accurate L2 vowel production and perception because, with age, L1 vowel categories become more likely to perceptually encompass neighboring L2 vowels. These IH predictions were evaluated in two experiments involving 64 native Korean-and English-speaking children and adults. Experiment 1 determined, as predicted, that the Korean children were less likely than the Korean adults to perceive L2 vowels as instances of a single L1 vowel category. Experiment 2 showed that the Korean children surpassed the Korean adults in production of certain vowels but equaled them in vowel perception. These findings, which partially support the IH, are discussed in relation to L2 speech learning.

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“…In the case of vowels, listeners may be asked to classify a sound as a member of a particular category (e.g., Andruski & Nearey, 1992;Strange, 1989b); or it may be determined whether they can discriminate between two sounds belonging to the same or different categories (e.g., Gottfried, Jenkins, & Strange, 1985;Schouten & van Hessen, 1992); or detection thresholds for different sound categories may be measured as a function ofcontext (e.g., Rakerd, Verbrugge, & Shankweiler, 1984) or at varying intensity levels (e.g., Kewley-Port, 1991). These tasks have the valuable property offorcing a response from the subject, even ifit is only a best guess.…”

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confidence: 99%

Speeded detection of vowels: A cross-linguistic study

Cutler

Ooijen

Norris

et al. 1996

Perception & Psychophysics

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In four experiments, listeners' response times to detect vowel targets in spoken input were measured, The first three experiments were conducted in English. In two, one using real words and the other, nonwords, detection accuracy was low, targets in initial syllables were detected more slowly than targets in final syllables, and both response time and missed-response rate were inversely correlated with vowel duration. In a third experiment, the speech context for some subjects included all English vowels, while for others, only five relatively distinct vowels occurred. This manipulation had essentially no effect, and the same response pattern was again observed. A fourth experiment, conducted in Spanish, replicated the results in the first three experiments, except that miss rate was here unrelated to vowel duration. We propose that listeners' responses to vowel targets in naturally spoken input are effectively cautious, reflecting realistic appreciation of vowel variability in natural context.The recognition of spoken words is an extremely rapid process, and seems, to the listener, mostly effortless. Words appear to be apprehended as wholes, and we certainly do not have the impression ofprocessing them phoneme by phoneme. Certainly, listeners can pay attention to phonemes; for instance, we can easily notice a speech error involving an exchange of phonemes ("woken spurds"), or realize that a speaker has consistent difficulty with a This research was supported by a grant from ESPRIT Basic Research Actions (P3207 "ACTS") to the first three authors and by a postdoctoral award from the Ministry of Education (Madrid) to the fourth author. We wish to express thanks to Sally Butterfield for background research, to Ian Nimmo-Smith for statistical advice, and to Jose Garcia-Albea for assistance with the recording of Experiment 4, with recruitment of the Madrid subjects, and for further useful discussions. We further thank the late David 1. Hakes for supplying raw data from the Hakes (1971) study, Randy Diehl for supplying raw data from the study by Diehl et al. (1987), Margaret Deuchar and Nuria Sebastian-Galles for assistance with data on Spanish, and James McQueen, Terry Nearey, and Randy Diehl for helpful comments on the manuscript. A pilot study for Experiments I and 2 was presented to the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Kobe, Japan, in November 1990. Correspondence should be addressed to the first author, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands (e-mail: anne.cutler@mpi.nl). particular sound. But, in general, our attention is not devoted to the level of individual speech sounds.Current models of spoken-word recognition have achieved considerable sophistication in simulating the time course of human recognition of spoken words; in particular, models that incorporate processes of simultaneous activation of and competition between alternative word candidates have been successful in simulating experimental results. The state of the art is ...

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Categorial discrimination of vowels produced in syllable context and in isolation

Cited by 9 publications

References 13 publications

Identification of vowels in quiet, noise, and reverberation: Relationships with age and hearing loss

Identification of vowels in quiet, noise, and reverberation: Relationships with age and hearing loss

Child—Adult Differences in Second-Language Phonological Learning: The Role of Cross-Language Similarity

Speeded detection of vowels: A cross-linguistic study

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