title: Long-term temporal tracking of speech rate affects spoken-word recognition.
abstract: Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University.
authors.forename: Melissa M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Baese-Berk
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park.
authors.forename: Christopher C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Heffner
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University ldilley@msu.edu.
authors.forename: Laura C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Dilley
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University.
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Pitt
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University.
authors.forename: Tuuli H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Morrill
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Michigan State University.
authors.forename: J Devin
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: McAuley
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013995:Time; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: entrainment; speech perception; speech rate; word segmentation