Sensitivity to grammatical and sociophonetic variability in perception

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie K. Drager
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Speaker Normalization ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Phonetic Detail ◽  
Phonetic Reduction

AbstractPhonetic realizations vary depending on social characteristics of the speaker, and recent research provides evidence that individuals are sensitive to at least some of these sociophonetic relationships during perception (Strand and Johnson, Gradient and visual speaker normalization in the perception of fricatives, Mouton, 1996; Hay et al., Journal of Phonetics 34: 458–484, 2006). In addition to socially-conditioned variation, there is evidence that phonetic realizations in production vary depending on the grammatical function of a word (Plug, Phonetic reduction and categorisation in exemplar-based representation:Observations on a Dutch discourse marker, 2005; Hay and Bresnan, The Linguistic Review 23: 321–349, 2006), yet it is not known whether listeners can actively exploit this phonetic variation in speech perception. This paper reports on three perception experiments conducted to determine whether perceivers' sensitivity to fine phonetic detail can assist in extraction of both grammatical and social meaning from the signal.

scholarly journals Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 629-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Kirkham
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

AbstractThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the happy vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the happy vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

scholarly journals Zebra finches exhibit speaker-independent phonetic perception of human speech

2009 ◽  
Vol 277 (1684) ◽  
pp. 1003-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena R. Ohms ◽  
Arike Gill ◽  
Caroline A. A. Van Heijningen ◽  
Gabriel J. L. Beckers ◽  
Carel ten Cate
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Taeniopygia Guttata ◽  
Zebra Finches ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Speaker Normalization ◽  
Acoustic Structure ◽  
Phonetic Perception ◽  
Speaker Independent ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Perceptual Abilities

Humans readily distinguish spoken words that closely resemble each other in acoustic structure, irrespective of audible differences between individual voices or sex of the speakers. There is an ongoing debate about whether the ability to form phonetic categories that underlie such distinctions indicates the presence of uniquely evolved, speech-linked perceptual abilities, or is based on more general ones shared with other species. We demonstrate that zebra finches ( Taeniopygia guttata ) can discriminate and categorize monosyllabic words that differ in their vowel and transfer this categorization to the same words spoken by novel speakers independent of the sex of the voices. Our analysis indicates that the birds, like humans, use intrinsic and extrinsic speaker normalization to make the categorization. This finding shows that there is no need to invoke special mechanisms, evolved together with language, to explain this feature of speech perception.

scholarly journals The Grammaticalization of the Spanish Construction lo que pasa es que: From Lexical Reference to Subjectification

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Philip P. Limerick
Keyword(s):  
16Th Century ◽  
Mechanisms Of Change ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Phonetic Reduction

The construction lo que pasa es que ‘what happens is that’ is a Spanish discourse marker that was originally a pseudo-cleft construction. Before becoming grammaticalized, the verb pasar contained its full lexical meaning ‘to happen,’ but later evolved into a fixed expression losing its lexical meaning and acquiring an implicit contrastive and causal meaning. The present study aims to describe the construction’s evolution on the path of grammaticalization in relation to Traugott’s (1989) three semantic-pragmatic tendencies. In addition, a Usage-based Theory approach is employed in order to describe some of the formal aspects of the construction. Using two corpora, CORDE and Corpus del Español, all instances of the construction were located and analyzed with regard to function and usage in context. Results indicate that the construction was first used in the 16th Century and that its evolution as lexical > concessive > epistemic is in line with Traugott’s tendencies. Mechanisms of change such as chunking and phonetic reduction and loss of compositionality and analyzability, as well as increase in overall frequency are also discussed in relation to this construction, lending further support to Usage-based theory.

Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Daland ◽  
Kie Zuraw
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Non Local ◽  
The Right ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Phonetic Realization

AbstractRecent evidence suggests that the phonetic realization of linguistic units is sensitive to informational context. For example, the duration of a word is shorter when it is probable given the following word. Word-specific phonetic variation is unexpected according to modular/feedforward models. We consider various challenges to identifying the loci of informational effects on phonetic implementation – do they arise in production, perception, memory, or some combination? Section 2 addresses a theoretical issue: what are the right measure(s) of predictability/informativity? An urgent direction for future work is to understand what kinds of context matter and why. Section 3 reviews second-mention reduction and other non-local discourse effects, which strongly suggest a production locus (rather than arising in speech perception or memory). Important future directions include modeling discourse/topic in corpus studies, and experimentally assessing the role of nonlocal context in perception and memory. Section 4 addresses the role of computational modeling. We call for integrated, implemented end-to-end models which include speech perception, lexical representation, and speech production components.

scholarly journals Speaker Normalization in Speech Perception

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-176
Author(s):  
Keith Johnson ◽  
Matthias J. Sjerps
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Speaker Normalization

scholarly journals Evaluating Low-Level Speech Features Against Human Perceptual Data

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 425-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin Richter ◽  
Naomi H. Feldman ◽  
Harini Salgado ◽  
Aren Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Speaker Normalization ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Human Data ◽  
Normalization Methods ◽  
Speech Features ◽  
New Framework ◽  
Better Than

We introduce a method for measuring the correspondence between low-level speech features and human perception, using a cognitive model of speech perception implemented directly on speech recordings. We evaluate two speaker normalization techniques using this method and find that in both cases, speech features that are normalized across speakers predict human data better than unnormalized speech features, consistent with previous research. Results further reveal differences across normalization methods in how well each predicts human data. This work provides a new framework for evaluating low-level representations of speech on their match to human perception, and lays the groundwork for creating more ecologically valid models of speech perception.

Prestige, accommodation, and the legacy of relative who

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra D'Arcy ◽  
Sali A. Tagliamonte
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Social ◽  
Age Grading ◽  
Relative Pronouns

AbstractThis article presents a quantitative variationist analysis of the English restrictive relative pronouns. However, where previous research has largely focused on language-internal explanations for variant choice, the focus here is the social meaning of this erstwhile syntactic variable. We uncover rich sociolinguistic embedding of the relative pronouns in standard, urban speech. The only productive wh- form is who, which continues to pattern as a prestige form centuries after its linguistic specialization as a human subject relative. This legacy of prestige is reflected not only in the social characteristics of those with whom it is associated, but also in the patterns of accommodation that are visible in its use. These findings simultaneously demonstrate the tenacious nature of social meaning and the enduring effects of grammatical ideology, both of which influence pronoun choice in the context of face-to-face interaction. (Restrictive relative pronouns, who, change from above, age-grading, prestige, accommodation)*

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