On the other hand, the speech waveform can be represented with cd quality using a sampling rate of 44,100sampless with 16 bit samples, or a data rate of 705,600bps. The point of the book is that when you consider the range of. How talker identity relates to language processing sarah c. The current work investigates this tradeoff by comparing speaker variability effects on l2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Effects of type, token, and talker variability in speech. Effects of talker variability on speech perception.
Phonetic constancy is achieved by adjusting interpretation of the signal as a function of bottomup and topdown constraints. How talker identity relates to language processing creel. Trends in hearing effects of withintalker variability the. A litany of studies on talker normalization have demonstrated that hearing multiple talkers incurs processing costs e. It is also unclear how processing a single talkers speech.
Martin speech research laboratory, department of psychology, indiana university. Talker variability refers to speaker differences in delivering the same linguistic information. There is currently no agreement as to how contextual and talker. In the current study, the effects of both talker and listener sex on speech intelligibility were assessed. Here, we investigated whether and how processing multitalker speech disrupts working memory. Talker n o rm alizatio n phonetic constancy as a cognitive process howard nusbaum.
Introduction to digital speech processing lawrence r. The effect of talker and intonation variability on speech. Despite this complexity, listeners are adept at comprehending speech in multipletalker contexts, albeit at a slight but measurable performance. Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in. The costs of processing speech from multiple talkers, known as the interference effect, are reflected in listeners slower response times during speech processing tasks 15,17.
The results suggest that listeners encode and use acousticphonetic variability in speech to reliably perceive the dialect of unfamiliar talkers. Speech perception, automatic speech recognition, language and languages publisher. Publications computational cognitive neuroscience of. Pdf effects of talker continuity and speech rate on. Under an auditory attention framework a change in talker disrupts listeners attentional processing, impairing their.
Dialects, idiolects, and speech processing tanya kraljic a, susan e. The speech signal is characterized by extreme variability in its acoustic composition. Effects of talker variability on perceptual learning of. A change in talker is a change in the context for the phonetic interpretation of acoustic patterns of speech. Pdf the effect of talker variability on word recognition in. This is a volume of papers that i edited with john mullennix. Nevertheless, several studies have shown that speech perception and spoken word recognition are affected by talker variability. The editors take on the difficult task of converting the mapping of speech patterns into mental representations. Effects of talker, rate, and amplitude variation on. Article the effect of talker and intonation variability on. It is unknown how processing costs from withintalker variation compare to those from betweentalker variation, and how these different effects scale and interact 5, 10.
Talker and listener sex in speech processing has been largely unknown and underappreciated to this point, with many studies overlooking the possible influences. The acoustic cues to consonants and vowels vary as a function of phonetic. Much of the research regarding talker variability effects has examined the notable acoustic variability found in. While talker variability materially affects language processing, it has historically been regarded as a curiosity rather than a central influence, possibly because talker variability does not fit with a conception of speech sounds as abstract categories. Unique in its approach, talker variability in speech processing embraces the differences in speech patterns without treating them as unwanted variables.
Maintaining detailed representations of talkerspeci. Speech carries both linguistic content phonemes, words, sentences and talker information, sometimes called indexical information. Stimulus variability and processing dependencies in speech. Keywords dialect categorization, indexical properties, perceptual learning, speech perception, talker variability. Pdf impact of talker adaptation on speech processing and. After traditional accounts of speech processing and storage are employed, we are left with a. These tasks reveal opposite effects of speech processing time on speech recognition while fast processing of multitalker speech impedes immediate recognition, it also results in more abstract and less talkerspecific longterm memories for speech. Variability in bimodal spoken language processing by native and nonnative speakers of english. Adults encoded similar talkers easily and better than preschoolers.
Variability between ci listeners in eye gaze behavior during learning fig 2 nh looks equally to the mouth when learning from a single talker or multiple talkers fig. The effects of talker variability on the perception of american english r and l by japanese listeners. Talker variability in speech processing book, 1997. Atr human information processing research laboratories technical report trh158. On the nature of talker variability effects on recall of. Talker n o rm alizatio n university of connecticut. The broader claim here is that the acoustic variability resulting from talker variation or accent or idiosyncrasies of the talker is intrinsic to representations of word form. Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. Frontiers multitalker speech promotes greater knowledge. Different methodological approaches to measuring intelligibility percent words correct vs. The role of talker variability and audiovisual speech on. The effects of talker variability on the acquisition of nonnative speech contrasts james s.
Speech is related to human physiological capability. Purpose in this study, the authors aimed to determine whether children with dyslexia hereafter referred to as dys children are more affected than children with average reading ability hereafter referred to as ar children by talker and intonation variability when perceiving speech in. In a series of experiments, the authors investigated the effects of talker variability on childrens word recognition. Highlights talker variability pervades the speech signal, but we know little about how its processing changes over development. The presence of talker variability has been evidenced by previous research to have impact on speech. Current models of talker variability in speech processing suggest that processing efficiency depends on.
Frontiers talker variability in audiovisual speech. However, when reframing these studies in terms of stimulus structure, it is evident that past tests of multipletalker i. Processing dependencies in speech perception between voice and phoneme were investigated using the garner 1974 speeded classification procedure. Understanding speech in the context of variability. Talker normalization computational cognitive neuroscience of. Talker information is not normalized in fluent speech. Varying acousticphonemic ambiguity reveals that talker. Some effects of talker variability on spoken word recognition. The idea that this variability is somewhat controlled by the listener melds nicely with the concept that there is considerable interlistener variability in listening strategies 20. Effects of talker variability on vowel recognition in. Additionally, to explore l2 listeners development of the two modes of processing, we tested the l2 participants before and after. While normalhearing nh listeners are able to largely accommodate within and acrosstalker variability, hearingimpaired hi listeners have greater di.
Given enormous variation in the acoustic realization. The distribution of talker variability impacts infants. Digital speech processing lecture 1 introduction to digital speech processing 2 speech processing speech is the most natural form of humanhuman communications. One thing that might help listeners is structure in talker variability. The general orientation of this research regards the inherent variability in the speech signal due to different talker and other instancespecific. Differences in talker recognition by preschoolers and adults. Despite this variability, listeners normally adapt to these differences quickly, affording rapid and successful processi ng of the speech of various talkers. In experiment 1, when stimuli were presented in the clear, 3 and 5yearolds were less accurate at identifying words spoken by multiple talkers than those spoken by a single talker when the multipletalker list was presented first. On this view, the speech recognition system is not concerned with straining out talker variability, but instead with storing. Talker variability in audiovisual speech perception. Pdf in a series of experiments, the authors investigated the effects of talker variability on. In contrast, both intratalker and intertalker variability can cause performance decrements.
Furthermore, evidence of the flexibility of human listeners in processing speech, given talker variability, provides additional support. Preschoolers easily learned distinct talkers, and a few preschoolers encoded similarsounding voices readily. Talker variability, in addition, involves variability in talker. In contrast, lexical discriminability a signalindependent factor. They cover theories of perception and cognition, issues in clinical speech pathology, and the practical concerns of speech technology. Talker normalization is mediated by structured indexical. Specifically, we found that the effect of talker variability across items in a list a signaldependent factor was equivalent across native and nonnative listeners, and across younger and older listeners. Yamada atr human information processing laboratories, 22 hikaridai, seika, soraku, kyoto, 61902, japan.
Speech variability has an effect on both speech processing and representation mclennan and luce, 2005. For example, talkers have been shown to vary their speech along a continuum of hyper and hypo speech, using hyperarticulation to assist the listener under difficult listening conditions and hypoarticulation when the talker believes that less articulatory precision can be tolerated by the listener 1. On the active control view of speech processing, the variability in speech does not obscure the underlying phonetic code but lawfully reflects properties of the message source the talker and other context. Some effects of talker variability on spoken word recognition john w. When interpreting the speech of different tal kers, listeners encounter a large amount of variability, including differences in pitch, speaking rate, and regional or foreign accent. Preschoolers and adults learned to map voices to characters. The influence of talker and foreignaccent variability on. To explore how multitalker speech affects the two modes of processing, we compared our results to those obtained from our previous study involving singletalker, low variability speech wiener et al. It is unknown how processing costs from within talker variation compare to those from between talker variation, and how these different effects scale and interact 5, 10. Just as experience with an individual talker leads to improved perceptual processing of that talkers speech, prior experience and familiarity with a given dialect should also lead to improved categorization of that dialect. Acoustic differences, listener expectations, and the.
Pdf talker adaptation is known to facilitate immediate speech recognition. Speech perception is challenged by indexical variability. Thus, most of speech research until the last two decades was quite. Bregman university of california, san diego abstract speech carries both linguistic content phonemes, words, sentences and talker information, sometimes called indexical information. Variability in the voice of the talker and in the cues to wordinitial consonants were manipulated. The effects of talker variability on speech perception are similar to.
A classic finding in speech perception is that speech is processed more efficiently from a single, continuous talker than from mixed talkers. Speaker normalization in speech perception uc berkeley linguistics. Other research in singletalker contexts have shown, however, that when listeners are able to see a talkers face, speech recognition is. The effect of talker variability on word recognition in. Different talkers have different mappings between acoustic patterns and phonetic categories and listeners need to adapt to these differences.
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