Classic non-native speech perception findings suggested that adults have difficulty discriminating segmental distinctions that are not employed contrastively in their own language. However, recent reports indicate a gradient of performance across non-native contrasts, ranging from near-chance to near-ceiling. Current theoretical models argue that such variations reflect systematic effects of experience with phonetic properties of native speech. The present research addressed predictions from Best’s perceptual assimilation model (PAM), which incorporates both contrastive phonological and noncontrastive phonetic influences from the native language in its predictions about discrimination levels for diverse types of non-native contrasts. We evaluated the PAM hypotheses that discrimination of a non-native contrast should be near-ceiling if perceived as phonologically equivalent to a native contrast, lower though still quite good if perceived as a phonetic distinction between good versus poor exemplars of a single native consonant, and much lower if both non-native segments are phonetically equivalent in goodness of fit to a single native consonant. Two experiments assessed native English speakers’ perception of Zulu and Tigrinya contrasts expected to fit those criteria. Findings supported the PAM predictions, and provided evidence for some perceptual differentiation of phonological, phonetic, and nonlinguistic information in perception of non-native speech. Theoretical implications for non-native speech perception are discussed, and suggestions are made for further research.

Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener's native phonological system

We review a series of experiments aimed at understanding the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia. These experiments investigate input and output phonological representations, phonological grammar, foreign speech perception and production, and unconscious speech processing and lexical access. Our results converge on the observation that the phonological representations of people with dyslexia may be intact, and that the phonological deficit surfaces only as a function of certain task requirements, notably short-term memory, conscious awareness, and time constraints. In an attempt to reformulate those task requirements more economically, we propose that individuals with dyslexia have a deficit in access to phonological representations. We discuss the explanatory power of this concept and we speculate that a similar notion might also adequately describe the nature of other associated cognitive deficits when present.

/pdf/what-phonological-deficit-59mmaoyxy7.pdf

What phonological deficit

In four cross-linguistic experiments comparing French and Japanese hearers, we found that the phonotactic properties of Japanese (very reduced set of syllable types) induce Japanese listeners to perceive ``illusory'' vowels inside consonant clusters in VCCV stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a continuum of stimuli ranging from no vowel (e.g. ebzo) to a full vowel between the consonants (e.g. ebuzo). Japanese, but not French participants, reported the presence of a vowel [u] between consonants, even in stimuli with no vowel. A speeded ABX discrimination paradigm was used in Experiments 3 and 4, and revealed that Japanese participants had trouble discriminating between VCCV and VCuCV stimuli. French participants, in contrast had problems discriminating items that differ in vowel length (ebuzo vs. ebuuzo), a distinctive contrast in Japanese but not in French. We conclude that models of speech perception have to be revised to account for phonotactically-based assimilations.

/pdf/epenthetic-vowels-in-japanese-a-perceptual-illusion-1owc82p9uj.pdf

Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: A perceptual illusion?

English Phonetics and Phonology

Motor Speech Disorders: Advances in Assessment and Treatment

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotacti- cally illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates—which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant tl—as being dental stops. However, as information for the /!/ became available in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the initial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme monitoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line during speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. These results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the native phonological system.

/pdf/processing-of-illegal-consonant-clusters-a-case-of-1e2sxmm1cq.pdf

Processing of illegal consonant clusters : A case of perceptual assimilation ?

La comprehension des mecanismes du langage necessite de prendre en compte tres precisement les interactions entre les differents domaines ou modalites linguistiques, ce qui implique la constitution et le developpement de ressources. Nous decrivons ici le CID (Corpus of Interactional Data), corpus audio-video de 8 heures, en francais, constitue au Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL). L'annotation multimodale du CID inclut la phonetique, la prosodie, la morphologie, la syntaxe, le discours et la mimo-gestualite. Nos premiers resultats d'etudes menees sur le CID permettent de confirmer l'interet d'une annotation multimodale pour mieux comprendre le fonctionnement du discours.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00349893/document

Le CID - Corpus of Interactional Data Annotation et exploitation multimodale de parole conversationnelle

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01205592/document

Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French: The role of lexical factors

In two experiments, French speakers detected cv or cvc sequences at the beginning of disyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. Overall, both studies failed to replicate the crossover interaction that has been previously observed in French by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Segui (1981). In both experiments, latencies were shorter to cv than to cvc targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for cvc cv than for cv cv carriers. However, a clear crossover interaction was observed for liquid pivotal consonants under target-blocking conditions, and especially for slow participants. A third experiment collected phonemegating data on the same pseudowords to obtain estimates of the duration of the initial phonemes. Regression analyses showed that phoneme duration accounted for a large proportion of the variance for cvc target detection, suggesting that participants were reacting rather directly to phonemic throughput. These findings argue against the hypot...

/pdf/sequence-detection-in-pseudowords-in-french-where-is-the-2i5znz5u9z.pdf

Sequence detection in pseudowords in French: Where is the syllable effect?

During the last decades, automatic speech processing systems witnessed an important progress and achieved remarkable reliability. As a result, such technologies have been exploited in new areas and applications including medical practice. In disordered speech evaluation context, perceptual evaluation is still the most common method used in clinical practice for the diagnosing and the following of the condition progression of patients despite its well documented limits (such as subjectivity). In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for the prediction of dysarthric speech evaluation metrics (intelligibility, severity, articulation impairment) based on the representation of the speech acoustics in the total variability subspace based on the i-vectors paradigm. The proposed approach, evaluated on 129 French dysarthric speakers from the DesPhoAPady and VML databases, is proven to be efficient for the modeling of patient's production and capable of detecting the evolution of speech quality. Also, low RMSE and high correlation measures are obtained between automatically predicted metrics and perceptual evaluations.

/pdf/automatic-prediction-of-speech-evaluation-metrics-for-4dl3ej4b4c.pdf

Christine Meunier

Papers

Processing of illegal consonant clusters : A case of perceptual assimilation ?

Le CID - Corpus of Interactional Data Annotation et exploitation multimodale de parole conversationnelle

Vowel reduction in conversational speech in French: The role of lexical factors

Sequence detection in pseudowords in French: Where is the syllable effect?

Automatic Prediction of Speech Evaluation Metrics for Dysarthric Speech