The role of variation in the perception of accented speech

Sumner, Meghan

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.018

Cited by 71 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…However, these findings are not entirely inconsistent with evidence suggesting that alignment of training tokens on a specific dimension facilitates perceptual learning of speech (Church et al, 2013;Iverson et al, 2005;Sumner, 2011). Sumner's (2011 results, for example, suggest that aligning training tokens by a specific acoustic property such as VOT may be more likely to elicit perceptual learning.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…However, few studies have examined this possibility. Sumner (2011) found that native English speakers who heard French-accented /b/-initial and /p/-initial words with variable VOTs experienced greater boundary shifts in their subsequent categorization of / ba/-/pa/ syllables relative to listeners who heard invariant VOTs during the exposure phase, suggesting that variable exposure may lead to shifts in category structure to incorporate nonnative pronunciations. Within the variable VOT exposure conditions, the order of word tokens was manipulated such that listeners either heard tokens presented randomly, progressively from more native-like to less native-like, or less native-like to more native-like.…”

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confidence: 96%

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The Role of Training Structure on Perceptual Learning of Accented Speech

Tzeng¹,

Nygaard²

2012

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Foreign-accented speech contains multiple sources of variation that listeners learn to accommodate. Extending previous findings showing that exposure to high-variation training facilitates perceptual learning of accented speech, the current study examines to what extent the structure of training materials affects learning. During training, native adult speakers of American English transcribed sentences spoken in English by native Spanish-speaking adults. In Experiment 1, training stimuli were blocked by speaker, sentence, or randomized with respect to speaker and sentence (Variable training). At test, listeners transcribed novel English sentences produced by Spanish-accented speakers. Listeners' transcription accuracy was highest in the Variable condition, suggesting that varying both speaker identity and sentence across training trials enabled listeners to generalize their learning to novel speakers and linguistic content. Experiment 2 assessed the extent to which ordering of training tokens by a single factor, speaker intelligibility, would facilitate speaker-independent accent learning, finding that listeners' test performance did not reliably differ across conditions. Overall, these results suggest that the structure of training exposure, specifically trial-by-trial variation on both speaker's voice and linguistic content, facilitates learning of the systematic properties of accented speech. The current findings suggest a crucial role of training structure in optimizing perceptual learning. Beyond characterizing the types of variation listeners encode in their representations of spoken utterances, theories of spoken language processing should incorporate the role of training structure in learning lawful variation in speech.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

The Role of Training Structure on Perceptual Learning of Accented Speech

Tzeng¹,

Nygaard²

2012

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…For example, Rost and McMurray (2010) found that only variation along the irrelevant dimensions of the input (e. g. pitch, intonation) boosts learning while variation along the relevant dimension (VOT) is not useful. In contrast, Sumner (2011) found that variation along the relevant dimension (VOT) facilitated adaptation. One way to reconcile these findings is to note that Rost and McMurray (2010) focus on the initial stages of language acquisition.…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Our Knowledgebasementioning

confidence: 67%

“…Similar arguments have been raised in the vision literature about the acquisition of visual categories (Posner and Keele 1968). In contrast, Sumner (2011) argued that input variability helps because it increases the odds that an incoming stimulus matches a stored instance. Another option is that variable input might also be more representative of the population at large, and thus facilitate the ability to deal with incoming input from novel speakers.…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Our Knowledgebasementioning

confidence: 79%

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Lev‐Ari

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

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People learn language from their social environment. Therefore, individual differences in the input that their social environment provides could influence their linguistic performance. Nevertheless, investigation of the role of individual differences in input on performance has been mostly restricted to first and second language acquisition. In this paper I argue that individual differences in input can influence linguistic performance even in adult native speakers. Specifically, differences in input can affect performance by influencing people's knowledgebase, by modulating their processing manner, and by shaping expectations. Therefore, studying the role that individual differences in input play can improve our understanding of how language is learned, processed and represented.Keywords: individual differences, social networks, PsychLingvarOne of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to understand how we make sense of incoming input and manage to transform it into meaningful utterances. On the face of it, this is a task that most of us seem to succeed at, yet a closer look reveals great variation in the degree of success at different aspects of the task, from speech perception to the comprehension of pragmatic intentions. So far, the study of individual differences in language processing has mostly focused on differences due to variation in cognitive skills. Much less attention has been devoted to individual differences in the social environment, and in particular, to differences in the properties of the input it provides, especially among adult native speakers. In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of the input that people receive play an important role in shaping their linguistic performance. I will focus on three manners by which input can do so: by influencing the knowledgebase that feeds the analysis of incoming language, by influencing the manner of processing, such as the mechanisms that are relied on and the cues that are attended to during language processing, and by shaping expectations, which, in turn, influence performance. From noise to structured differencesThe realization that individual differences in performance can be informative about language processing and representation and are not merely noise that needs to be reduced has only gained popularity in Psycholinguistics over the last couple of decades. For many decades, experimental studies in psycholinguistics, as well as in other fields, focused on the commonalities, on how people in general perform certain tasks, and how the average participant is influenced by certain manipulations. Individual differences in performance were treated as noise. After all, by definition, participants' score on any task is composed of their "true" score and the measurement error, and so differences might simply be noise. If the experiment is conducted well, the measurement errors should cancel each other, and the general trend would be discovered. It is only in the 90s that the systematicity in this "noise" has started to be explo...

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“…This suggests that these listeners have ruled out the possibility of a reversed mapping between f0 and voicing (/b/ vs. /p/), possibly perhaps American English talkers typically do not typically produce it (e.g., House, 1953). Likewise, Sumner (2011) found that listeners had trouble adapting to a talker who produced VOT distributions for /b/ and /p/ that had substantially lower means (approximately -60ms and 0ms, respectively) than a typical talker (approximately 0-10ms and 60ms VOT; Lisker & Abramson, 1964).…”

Section: What Do You Expect From An Unfamiliar Talker? Inferring Listmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception in a Variable but Structured World: The Case of Speech Perception

Kleinschmidt¹

2017

Preprint

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Perceptual systems have to make sense out of a world that is not only noisy and ambiguous, but that also varies from situation to situation. Human speech perception is a perceptual domain where this problem has long been acknowledged: individual talkers vary substantially in how they produce linguistic units using acoustic cues. Yet, how the speech system solves this problem of talker variability remains poorly understood. This thesis presents a computational framework---the ideal adapter---for understanding this problem and how the speech perception system solves it. The basic insight of this framework is that variability in speech is not arbitrary but rather structured: talkers are reasonably consistent in the way they produce cues, and individual talkers tend to cluster into groups by gender, regional background, etc. This structure means that listeners can use their previous experience with other talkers to guide perception of unfamiliar talkers, as well as familiar talkers that they encounter again. This framework unifies a large and messy literature on how listeners cope with talker variability, leads to quantitative models that provide good fits to human behavior in a variety of situations, and makes specific, testable predictions that open up new frontiers in understanding speech perception. This framework also applies to perception in general, and highlights how speech perception can serve as a model organism for understanding how perceptual systems cope with a variable but structured world.

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The role of variation in the perception of accented speech

Cited by 71 publications

References 45 publications

The Role of Training Structure on Perceptual Learning of Accented Speech

The Role of Training Structure on Perceptual Learning of Accented Speech

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Perception in a Variable but Structured World: The Case of Speech Perception

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