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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Laurence WhiteORCiD, Dr Sarah Knight
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© 2022 International Speech Communications Association. All rights reserved. In many languages, speech sounds adjacent to prosodic boundaries are lengthened. Moreover, listeners – particularly learners – exploit word-initial consonant lengthening to locate word boundaries, whilst phrase-final lengthening indicates upcoming prosodic breaks and conversational transitions. How lengthening is detected in the temporally-linear speech stream remains unclear, however. We investigated listeners’ possible use of predictive mechanisms to generate hypotheses about upcoming segment durations and thereby interpret deviations from temporal expectations (specifically, lengthening) as linguistically meaningful. In a series of nonword segmentation experiments, listeners heard 90 twelve-syllable nonsense streams, with – on half the trials – trisyllabic nonword targets embedded (e.g., dumipakolibekubinudafolu). Segment duration was systematically varied. On the 45 target-present trials, targets were early, medial or late in the nonsense stream (but at least two syllables from utterance edges). Listeners had to respond quickly and accurately when detecting targets. As expected, target-initial consonant lengthening boosted detection, but this was strongly conditioned by target location within utterances. Specifically, differential effects of timing on detection were much stronger for utterance-late targets than utterance-medially (with uniformly poor utterance-early performance). We explore the factors contributing to this (initially unexpected) pattern, in particular, the hypothesis that predictions about segment duration rely on sufficient experience of foregoing speech rate.
Author(s): White L, Mattys S, Knight S, Saunders T, Macbeath L
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody - Speech Prosody 2022
Year of Conference: 2022
Pages: 322-326
Online publication date: 26/05/2022
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
ISSN: 2333-2042
Publisher: International Speech Communication Association
URL: https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-66
DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-66
