The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception

Abstract

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing so, we illuminate a paradox that results in the literature from, we argue, the focus on representations and the peripheral treatment of word-level phonetic variation. We consider phonetic variation more fully and highlight a growing body of work that is problematic for current theory: words with different pronunciation variants are recognized equally well in immediate processing tasks, while an atypical, infrequent, but socially idealized form is remembered better in the long-term. We suggest that the perception of spoken words is socially weighted, resulting in sparse, but high-resolution clusters of socially idealized episodes that are robust in immediate processing and are more strongly encoded, predicting memory inequality. Our proposal includes a dual-route approach to speech perception in which listeners map acoustic patterns in speech to linguistic and social representations in tandem. This approach makes novel predictions about the extraction of information from the speech signal, and provides a framework with which we can ask new questions. We propose that language comprehension, broadly, results from the integration of both linguistic and social information.

Beyond lexical meaning: The effect of emotional prosody on spoken word recognition

“…Second, the extracted emotional information directly activates associated words, just as the lexical meaning of a word spreads its semantic activation to semantically associated words. Our result supports an approach in spoken word recognition where both social encoding (e.g., recognizing the emotional state of the speaker) and linguistic encoding (e.g., recognizing what word was said) occur simultaneously and are essential components of spoken word recognition (e.g., Sumner et al, 2014).…”

“…The general assumption has been that phonetically cued social information is either ignored or non-integral for spoken word recognition, but more recent approaches suggest this information is in fact integral to recognizing spoken words (e.g., Sumner et al, 2014). The current study focuses on one type of phonetically cued social information, phonetically cued emotional information (i.e., emotional prosody) and investigates effects of emotional prosody on spoken word recognition.…”

Matched guise effects can be robust to speech style

“…Splicing a phonetic or phonological variant associated with fast-speech reduction into a word produced in clear-speech citation form can inhibit processing relative to the fully canonical form, but that inhibition seems to arise from the variant/word mismatch rather than the presence of the variant: when the variant is left in its natural whole-word form, the word is processed as rapidly as the canonical form [what Sumner et al (2014) call "recognition equivalence"]. A similar effect might be expected to come into play with use of the MGT.…”

A new test for exemplar theory: Varying versus non-varying words in Spanish

“…Given its emphasis on such details, one of the challenges for exemplar theory has been to provide a mechanism by which listeners can nevertheless make generalizations and recognize highly variable speech input as words. In several proposals, this is accomplished with clustering (K. Johnson 1997Sumner et al 2014;Pierrehumbert 2016). The basic idea is that exemplars which are similar to each other, such as those containing the same sequence of segments or those produced by the same talker, cluster together in acoustic space.…”

“…In the current study, we broaden the investigation beyond voices, and test the unique predictions of exemplar theory by focusing instead on positional variation (Sumner et al 2014). Positional variation occurs when speakers can optionally realize a segment in more than one way, but only when that segment occupies a particular position.…”