Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
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Melissa Baese-Berk
,
Tuuli H. Morrill
Abstract
Phonological knowledge is influenced by a variety of cues that reflect predictability (e.g. semantic predictability). Listeners utilize various aspects of predictability when determining what they have heard. In the present paper, we ask how aspects of the acoustic phonetic signal (e.g. speaking rate) interact with other knowledge reflecting predictability (e.g. lexical frequency and collocation strength) to influence how speech is perceived. Specifically, we examine perception of function words by native and non-native speakers. Our results suggest that both native and non-native speakers are sensitive to factors that influence the predictability of the signal, including speaking rate, frequency, and collocation strength, when listening to speech, and use these factors to predict the phonological structure of stretches of ambiguous speech. However, reliance on these cues differs as a function of their experience and proficiency with the target language. Non-native speakers are less sensitive to some aspects of the acoustic phonetic signal (e.g. speaking rate). However, they appear to be quite sensitive to other factors, including frequency. We discuss how these results inform our understanding of the interplay between predictability and speech perception by different listener populations and how use of features reflecting predictability interacts with recovery of phonological structure of spoken language.
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©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
- Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
- Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
- Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
- Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
- The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
- Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
- Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
- Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
- Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
- Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
- Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
- Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
- The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
Articles in the same Issue
- Predictability and phonology: past, present and future
- Predictability and perception for native and non-native listeners
- Mergers in Bardi: contextual probability and predictors of sound change
- Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers: Between-category and within-category dependencies among cues for place and voice
- Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech
- The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
- Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation
- Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory
- Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories
- Truncation in message-oriented phonology: a case study using Korean vocative truncation
- Durational contrast in gemination and informativity
- Practice makes perfect: the consequences of lexical proficiency for articulation
- Patterns of probabilistic segment deletion/reduction in English and Japanese
- The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns
