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, although 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 and 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: (a) sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker; (b) sine-wave sentences modeled on a different talker, to create familiarity with a sine-wave carrier; and (c) 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: Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Columbia University, NY, USA. remez@columbia.edu
authors: Robert E
authors: RE
authors: Remez
authors: Kathryn R
authors: KR
authors: Dubowski
authors: Robin S
authors: RS
authors: Broder
authors: Morgana L
authors: ML
authors: Davids
authors: Yael S
authors: YS
authors: Grossman
authors: Marina
authors: M
authors: Moskalenko
authors: Jennifer S
authors: JS
authors: Pardo
authors: Sara Maria
authors: SM
authors: Hasbun
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D010507:Periodicity; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012016:Reference Values; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics