Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

Mitterer, Holger; Ernestus, Mirjam

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2005.03.003

Cited by 99 publications

(166 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…At the same time, an ambiguous pronunciation was presented, which either favored a /Ct#/ or a /C#/ interpretation. The stimuli with a ϩ/t/ acoustic bias contained a shorter penultimate consonant and a longer closure than the stimuli with Ϫ/t/ acoustic bias (following properties of normal spoken Dutch; Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006). This manipulation was successful: Distances between fixation position and the /Ct#/ word were smaller if the form had a ϩ/t/ bias.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The aim of Experiment 2 was to examine why an effect of following context was found in the stop trials in Experiment 1 but not in Mitterer and Ernestus (2006). We argued, in motivating Experiment 1, that effects of following context may only be found in more natural listening situations, where listeners are attending to the meaning of spoken utterances, and hence that the reason for the absence of an effect in the earlier study might have been that the 2AFC task used there focused listeners' attention too much on the acoustic-phonetic detail in the stimuli.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In perception experiments, Mitterer and Ernestus found that listeners, just as in the case of assimilation, are attuned to these residual cues, so that the presence of an elongated closure or a shorter penultimate consonant led listeners to infer the presence of /t/. Mitterer and Ernestus (2006) also found that /t/ reduction is similar to place assimilation in another regard: Its occurrence in production is contextually conditioned. Specifically, /t/ reduction occurs particularly often after /s/ and before labial consonants.…”

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confidence: 98%

“…The latter finding is particularly important for two reasons: it concerns a cross-word dependency, and one that is probabilistic. In the casual-speech subcorpus of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (http:// lands.let.kun.nl/cgn/ehome.htm), for example, word-final /t/ was reduced in 86% of following labial contexts (after factoring out effects of preceding context), but in 33% of following alveolar contexts (see Table 3 in Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006). Cross-word dependencies of this type are difficult for lexical-storage accounts to explain (Mitterer, 2006a).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This conclusion, however, is based on the absence of an effect of following context in Mitterer and Ernestus (2006). The experimental technique they used was a simple 2AFC task.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production.

Mitterer¹,

McQueen²

2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is tas, bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of tast, touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4 printed words, each associated with a geometrical shape. Minimal pairs (e.g., tas/tast) were either both above (boven) or both next to (naast) different shapes. Spoken instructions (e.g., "Klik op het woordje tas boven de ster," [Click on the word bag above the star]) thus became unambiguous only on their final words. Prior to disambiguation, listeners' fixations were drawn to /t/-final words more when boven than when naast followed the ambiguous sequences. This behavior reflects Dutch speechproduction data: /t/ is reduced more before /b/ than before /n/. We thus argue that probabilistic knowledge about the effect of following context in speech production is used prelexically in perception to help resolve lexical ambiguities caused by continuous-speech processes.Keywords: spoken-word recognition, continuous-speech processes, /t/-reduction, eye tracking, DutchContinuous speech is peppered with noncanonical pronunciations of words. Continuous-speech processes, such as assimilation, reduction, and deletion, operate during speech production and can substantially change the way words are realized. For example, a speaker of British English may say [waImbɔʔ1] in a casual request for a wine bottle, but say [waIn] and [bɔtəl] when asked how these words should be pronounced. It is the listener's task to recognize spoken words in spite of this variability. A particularly acute problem is when a continuous-speech process creates a lexical ambiguity. We examine that situation here, focusing on the effects of word-final /t/ reduction. If a speaker does not clearly pronounce the final [t] of duct, for example, how does the listener work out that they are not talking about a duck?Two answers to this question have been proposed. The first is based on lexical storage. There are in fact three radically different versions of this view. Lahiri and Marslen-Wilson (1991) and Lahiri and Reetz (2002) proposed a model of the mental lexicon in which entries are highly abstract and phonologically underspecified. A lexical entry for a given word only includes the phonological features that are reliably associated with tokens of that word. For instance, the alveolar nasal consonants in English are assumed to be specified only as nasal, with no specification of place of articulation, which may vary due to phonological assimilation. The token [waIm] can be recognized as an instance of the word wine because there is no mismatch between the last nasal segment [m] in the input and the lexical representation for this segment. Similarly, lexical entries may be underspecified for the presence of a word-final /t/. The input [d∧k] would thus match a stored lexical representation corresponding to duct. The second lexical-storage a...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 98%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This conclusion, however, is based on the absence of an effect of following context in Mitterer and Ernestus (2006). The experimental technique they used was a simple 2AFC task.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production.

Mitterer¹,

McQueen²

2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Speech Perception

Eisner

McQueen²

2018

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience

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This chapter reviews the computational processes that are responsible for recognizing word forms in the speech stream. We outline the different stages in a processing hierarchy from the extraction of general acoustic features, through speech‐specific prelexical processes, to the retrieval and selection of lexical representations. We argue that two recurring properties of the system as a whole are abstraction and adaptability. We also present evidence for parallel processing of information on different timescales, more specifically that segmental material in the speech stream (its consonants and vowels) is processed in parallel with suprasegmental material (the prosodic structures of spoken words). We consider evidence from both psycholinguistics and neurobiology wherever possible, and discuss how the two fields are beginning to address common computational problems. The challenge for future research in speech perception will be to build an account that links these computational problems, through functional mechanisms that address them, to neurobiological implementation.

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