When the auditory and visual components of spoken audiovisual nonsense syllables are mismatched, perceivers produce four different types of perceptual responses, auditory correct, visual correct, fusion (the so-called "McGurk effect"), and combination (i.e., two consonants are reported). Here, quantitative measures were developed to account for…

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the…

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit "dimension-based statistical learning" of correlations between acoustic…

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly…

Perceptual integration of the sound directly emanating from the source with reflections needs both temporal storage and correlation computation of acoustic details. We examined whether the temporal storage is frequency dependent and associated with speech unmasking. In Experiment 1, a break in correlation (BIC) between interaurally correlated…

The present study investigated the role of emotional tone of voice in the perception of spoken words. Listeners were presented with words that had either a happy, sad, or neutral meaning. Each word was spoken in a tone of voice (happy, sad, or neutral) that was congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to affective meaning, and naming…

Three picture-word interference (PWI) experiments assessed the extent to which embedded subset words are activated during the identification of spoken superset words (e.g., "bone" in "trombone"). Participants named aloud pictures (e.g., "brain") while spoken distractors were presented. In the critical condition,…

Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, 7-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adultlike abilities to understand speech when only sine waves (SWs)…

In a cross-modal matching task, participants were asked to match visual and auditory displays of speech based on the identity of the speaker. The present investigation used this task with acoustically transformed speech to examine the properties of sound that can convey cross-modal information. Word recognition performance was also measured under…

Two studies investigated how components of speaking rate, articulation rate and pause rate, combine to influence processing of the silence-duration cue for the voicing distinction in medial stop consonants. Listeners adjust for both articulation rate and pause rate changes in articulation rate had more effect on phonetic judgments. (Author/RD)

The perception of syllable-initial stop consonants as voiced or voiceless was shown to depend on prevailing rate of articulation. Reducing articulatory rate of a precursor phrase causes a greater proportion of test consonants to be identified as voiced. Timing should be regarded as intrinsic to the acoustical specifications of phonetic events.…