Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception

Abstract

explicitly study the nature of the link between speaker-and listener-specific behaviour in the production and perception of prosodic categories� Their particularly novel finding is that speakers vary contextually, i� e� a given speaker can be more intelligible than other speakers for a particular listener, although she/he may be less intelligible than average for another specific listener� These findings suggest that speech comprehension of prosodic categories is shaped by the specificities of particular dyads� Iris Chuoying Ouyang and Elsi Kaiser, too, dedicate their chapter to pros-ody� They investigate the prosodic realization of information-structural factors (new-information and corrective focus), crossed with informationtheoretic factors (word frequency and contextual probability), in terms of both inter-and intra-speaker variability� The results show that these two types of factors interact in determining several aspects of the fundamental frequency contours� Moreover, speakers exhibit individual variability regarding the magnitude of prosodic cues, but the direction of prosodic distinctions between information categories is consistent across speakers� Melanie Weirich presents her work on organic sources for inter-speaker variability in articulation with an emphasis on palatal shape, vocal tract dimensions, and tongue biomechanics� The speaker groups that are taken into account are monozygotic versus dizygotic twins who grew up together, and male versus female adults� Based on the analyses of selected phonemes and phonemic contrasts, it is shown that individual differences in organic structures can at least partially explain some idiosyncratic aspects of articulation, and the often observed speaker variation is far more than only random noise�

A New Approach to the Formant Measuring Problem

“…Applications of high-accuracy formant measurements equipped with error bars should be plentiful, but two examples worthwhile are forensic speaker identification (e.g., [27]) and medical diagnosis (e.g., [28]). Remarkably, the field of forensic phonetics seems to have adopted a Bayesian methodology [29,30], so perhaps in the future this model could deliver quantities directly for use in their likelihood ratios [6].…”

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Individual Differences in Speech Planning

“…Then, those initiation times FIGURE 1 | Contrast and control conditions in Swets et al (2014). Figures 1 and 2 are reprinted from Swets (2015). With permission from Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, copyright 2015.…”

Unraveling the contributions of prosodic patterns and individual traits on cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence modality

“…Although speakers within the same linguistic community often exhibit consistent behaviors, significant individual variations can still be observed in processing complex linguistic categories [ 37 , 38 ]. The impact of speaker-specific factors on speech perception has been interpreted in many ways over time, with numerous dimensions of individual differences being investigated.…”