Elsevier

Journal of Phonetics

Volume 75, July 2019, Pages 94-112
Journal of Phonetics

Research Article
Contextual predictability and phonetic attention

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.05.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Better acoustic discrimination of contextually unpredictable vs. predictable word repetitions.

  • Results suggest greater phonetic accommodation of unpredictable speech.

  • More attention to, storage of, and/or maintenance of phonetic details for unpredictable speech.

  • Exemplars may contain abstract and veridical details, modulated by contextual predictability.

Abstract

The interaction of contextual, high-level linguistic knowledge and the listener’s attention to low-level phonetic details has been the subject of a large body of research in speech perception for several decades. In the current paper, I investigate this interaction by considering the specific phenomenon of word predictability and its role in modulating the listener’s attention to subphonemic details of the acoustic signal. In the first experiment, subjects are presented with a discrimination task in which target words are presented in either predictable or unpredictable sentential context and then repeated in isolation, being either acoustically identical or subtly different. The subjects more accurately discriminate contextually unpredictable words, suggesting more attention to the phonetic details of words in unpredictable contexts. In the second experiment, considering the predictions of exemplar theory, I test whether this perceptual bias could result in changes in production. In this experiment, in which subjects heard and repeated sentences, I find a significant effect of word predictability on how close the subjects’ productions were to the model’s, which suggests a role of predictability on phonetic accommodation. The results of these experiments contribute to our understanding of stored exemplars and suggest the influence of contextual predictability in sound change.

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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