Long-standing problems in speech perception dissolve within an information-theoretic perspective

Kluender, Keith R.; Stilp, Christian E.; Lucas, Fernando Llanos

doi:10.3758/s13414-019-01702-x

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 166 publications

(180 reference statements)

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“…These principles are so formative that one can conceptualize a considerable portion of speech perception as being change detection (Winn & Stilp, ). Kluender and colleagues (Kluender & Alexander, ; Kluender & Kiefte, ; Kluender, Stilp, & Kiefte, ; Kluender, Stilp, & Llanos, ) have promoted an information‐theoretic approach to speech perception because emphasizing what is changing or unpredictable maximizes the potential information that can be transmitted to the perceiver. Many acoustic context effects are perfect examples of how acoustic differences between sounds are perceptually exaggerated to facilitate speech perception and ultimately guide adaptive behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic context effects in speech perception

Stilp

2019

WIRES Cognitive Science

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The extreme acoustic variability of speech is well established, which makes the proficiency of human speech perception all the more impressive. Speech perception, like perception in any modality, is relative to context, and this provides a means to normalize the acoustic variability in the speech signal. Acoustic context effects in speech perception have been widely documented, but a clear understanding of how these effects relate to each other across stimuli, timescales, and acoustic domains is lacking. Here we review the influences that spectral context, temporal context, and spectrotemporal context have on speech perception. Studies are organized in terms of whether the context precedes the target (forward effects) or follows it (backward effects), and whether the context is adjacent to the target (proximal) or temporally removed from it (distal). Special cases where proximal and distal contexts have competing influences on perception are also considered. Across studies, a common theme emerges: acoustic differences between contexts and targets are perceptually magnified, producing contrast effects that facilitate perception of target sounds and words. This indicates enhanced sensitivity to changes in the acoustic environment, which maximizes the amount of potential information that can be transmitted to the perceiver. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic context effects in speech perception

Stilp

2019

WIRES Cognitive Science

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“…Recent psychoacoustic studies also show that capturing correlation between different acoustic attributes may improve sound perception (Stilp et al, 2010;Stilp and Kluender, 2011. However, in auditory signal processing, the benefits of relying on correlated cues over single cues are even more prominent in vocal communication in animals and in speech (Kluender et al, 2019). A recent study has emphasized the value of sound categorization of marmoset vocalizations using combinations of acoustic features (Liu et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Efficient Coding of Correlated Acoustic Properties

Lü¹,

Liu²,

Dutta³

et al. 2019

J. Neurosci.

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Natural sounds such as vocalizations often have covarying acoustic attributes, resulting in redundancy in neural coding. The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that sensory systems are able to detect such covariation and adapt to reduce redundancy, leading to more efficient neural coding. Recent psychoacoustic studies have shown the auditory system can rapidly adapt to efficiently encode two covarying dimensions as a single dimension, following passive exposure to sounds in which temporal and spectral attributes covaried in a correlated fashion. However, these studies observed a cost to this adaptation, which was a loss of sensitivity to the orthogonal dimension. Here we explore the neural basis of this psychophysical phenomenon by recording single-unit responses from the primary auditory cortex in awake ferrets exposed passively to stimuli with two correlated attributes, similar in stimulus design to the psychoacoustic experiments in humans. We found: (1) the signal-to-noise ratio of spike-rate coding of cortical responses driven by sounds with correlated attributes remained unchanged along the exposure dimension, but was reduced along the orthogonal dimension; (2) performance of a decoder trained with spike data to discriminate stimuli along the orthogonal dimension was equally reduced; (3) correlations between neurons tuned to the two covarying attributes decreased after exposure; and (4) these exposure effects still occurred if sounds were correlated along two acoustic dimensions, but varied randomly along a third dimension. These neurophysiological results are consistent with the efficient coding hypothesis and may help deepen our understanding of how the auditory system encodes and represents acoustic regularities and covariance.

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“…plosive, bilabial [16]. Similarly few letters are voiced and unvoiced consonant [17], aspirated and pharyngeal etc. The set of features can represent IPA symbols.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hindustani or Hindi vs. Urdu: A Computational Approach for the Exploration of Similarities Under Phonetic Aspects

Suffian¹,

Ahmed²,

Yaseen³

2020

IJACSA

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The semantic coexistence is the reason to adopt the language spoken by other people. In such human habitats, different languages share words typically known as loan words which appears not only as of the principal medium of enriching language vocabulary but also for creating influence upon each other for building stronger relationships and forming multilingualism. In this context, the spoken words are usually common but their writing scripts vary or the language may have become a digraphia. In this paper, we presented the similarities and relatedness between Hindi and Urdu (that are mutually intelligible and major languages of Indian sub-continent). In general, the method modifies edit-distance; and works in the fashion that instead of using alphabets from the words it uses articulatory features from the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA) to get the phonetic edit distance. This paper also shows the results for the languages consonant under the method which quantifies the evidence that the Urdu and Hindi languages are 67.8% similar on average despite the script differences.

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Long-standing problems in speech perception dissolve within an information-theoretic perspective

Cited by 13 publications

References 166 publications

Acoustic context effects in speech perception

Acoustic context effects in speech perception

Adaptive Efficient Coding of Correlated Acoustic Properties

Hindustani or Hindi vs. Urdu: A Computational Approach for the Exploration of Similarities Under Phonetic Aspects

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