title: AUDITORY-PHONETIC PROJECTION AND LEXICAL STRUCTURE IN THE RECOGNITION OF SINE-WAVE WORDS.
abstract: Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, though signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances composed of words. Three tests were conducted to estimate the effects of exposure to natural and sine-wave samples of speech in this kind of perceptual versatility. First, sine-wave versions of the easy/hard word sets were created, modeled on the speech samples of a single talker. The performance difference in recognition of easy and hard words was used to index the perceptual reliance on signal-independent properties of lexical contrasts. Second, several kinds of exposure produced familiarity with an aspect of sine-wave speech: 1) sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker; 2) sine-wave sentences modeled on a different talker, to create familiarity with a sine-wave carrier; and 3) natural sentences spoken by the same talker, to create familiarity with the idiolect expressed in the sine-wave words. Recognition performance with both easy and hard sine-wave words improved after exposure only to sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker. Third, a control test showed that signal-independent uncertainty is a plausible cause of differences in recognition of easy and hard sine-wave words. The conditions of beneficial exposure reveal the specificity of attention underlying versatility in speech perception.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University.
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Remez
authors.forename: Kathryn R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Dubowski
authors.forename: Robin S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Broder
authors.forename: Morgana L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Davids
authors.forename: Yael S
authors.initials: YS
authors.lastname: Grossman
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moskalenko
authors.forename: Jennifer S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Pardo
authors.forename: Sara Maria
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Hasbun