Research ArticleContextual predictability and phonetic attention
Section snippets
Contextual predictability and phonetic attention
Contextual predictability is the likelihood that the listener can determine a particular word based on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic content surrounding that word, and is independent of the acoustic cues present. That is to say, a word’s predictability in a given context would be the same regardless of whether that word was spoken clearly, severely reduced, or even omitted entirely. Consider first the word ‘castles’ in the two sentences below:
1a. Kings and queens live in castles.
1b.
Purpose
The purpose of the first experiment is to determine the role of contextual predictability in processing low-level phonetic detail in speech perception. The experiment will build on previous literature not only in considering word predictability specifically (rather than context more generally, which could include either lexical or sentential level predictability) but also in considering attention to subphonemic detail, rather than phoneme level errors or omissions. Furthermore, I will induce a
Purpose
Experiment #1 established a perceptual bias suggesting that subjects stored richer, more veridical acoustic detail in the memory traces of unpredictable words, perhaps due to differences in the attention allotted to unpredictable speech. In Experiment #2, we extend these findings to production, hypothesizing that the perceptual bias will in turn yield a production bias— that words heard in unpredictable contexts will more freely change to adopt novel variation perceived in other speakers’
Discussion and conclusion
In experiment #1, subjects performed a discrimination task in which they were asked to detect the acoustic difference of words repeated in isolation after hearing them in predictable or unpredictable sentential contexts. Subjects showed superior discrimination abilities when presented with unpredictable target words. This finding suggests that listeners exhibit a perceptual bias such that more attention is allotted to the acoustic signal when hearing unpredictable speech, and as a result, a
Conclusion
Drawing from observations in past literature, the current study finds evidence suggesting that the contextual predictability of words modulates the listener’s attention to the acoustic signal, resulting in longer lasting, more veridical exemplars of unpredictable speech stored in memory. Demonstrated first in a discrimination task in experiment #1, I contend that this perceptual bias resulted in a production bias in experiment #2, following predictions from exemplar theory and phonetic
Notes
1While ‘quarter,’ seems to be an exception in standard American English, it is pronounced with initial /kV/ by the author and the model speaker (as opposed to with a cluster, [kwV]).
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Dr. Keith Johnson, Dr. Susan Lin, Dr. Jason Shaw, the Berkeley PhonLab, the Berkeley Phonology Phorum, and the Yale Phonology Reading Group for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also thanks to Libby Perfitt, Steven Chan Ho, and Sofea Dil for assisting in collecting the data for this experiment. Funding provided by the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department.
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