SHORT-TERM PERCEPTUAL TUNING TO TALKER CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

When a listener encounters an unfamiliar talker, the ensuing perceptual accommodation to the unique characteristics of the talker has two aspects: (1) the listener assesses acoustic characteristics of speech to resolve the properties of the talker's sound production; and, (2) the listener appraises the talker's idiolect, subphonemic phonetic properties that compose the finest grain of linguistic production. A new study controlled a listener's exposure to determine whether the perceptual benefit rests on specific segmental experience. Effects of sentence exposure were measured using a spoken word identification task of Easy words (likely words drawn from sparse neighborhoods of less likely words) and Hard words (less likely words drawn from dense neighborhoods of more likely words). Recognition of words was facilitated by exposure to voiced obstruent consonants. Overall, these findings indicate that talker-specific perceptual tuning might depend more on exposure to phonemically marked consonants than to exposure distributed across the phoneme inventory.

Keywords: perceptual tuning; speech perception; talker familiarity.

Figure 1.

Spectrographic representation of the easy word GIRL. A token of natural speech used as the model for the sine-wave version is shown in the left of the figure; the three-tone sine-wave replica is shown in the right of the figure. Note the absence of aperiodic release burst, glottal pulsing and broadband resonances in the sine-wave version, which replicates the estimated frequency and amplitude variation of the natural spectrotemporal pattern, yet does so in three time-varying sinusoids. Sine-wave replicas of natural utterances express the aggregate pattern of acoustic effects of natural vocalization, yet lack the momentary acoustic components (the “speech cues”) characteristic of natural speech (after Remez et al., 2011a)

Figure 2.

The mean identification performance of the seven tests of the effects of exposure on the identification of Easy and Hard words. Along the x-axis, the exposure conditions are arrayed, described by the feature composition of the sentence set. Note that an eighth condition, Null Exposure reported in Remez et al. (2011a), is also included as a standard for comparison. In each exposure condition, the identification performance of Easy and Hard words, expressed as a proportion of possible performance, is shown in a pair of bars. The filled bars show Easy word performance, the open bars show the Hard word performance. Error bars portray the standard error of each group.