Perception of all English Sound Sequences: The Diphones Project
Natasha Warner, University of Arizona
collaborators: Anne Cutler, James McQueen, Seongjin Park, Priscilla Shin, Maureen Hoffmann

[Background reading: Warner, McQueen, & Cutler (2014)]

Most speech perception experiments test perception of specific sequences of speech sounds in order to test specific hypotheses. In this study, we tested perception of the 2288 possible two-sound sequences (diphones) of English, such as /an, tʃɛ, pt, oʲæ/ as well as the more usual /ba, ab/ etc. For each diphone, we created six gates, with end points at thirds of each phoneme (e.g. one-third through /a/, two-thirds through it, at the end of /a/, one-third through /n/ in /an/, etc.). Listeners heard each gated stimulus (a total of 13,464 stimuli) and were asked to respond with what two sounds they heard or heard the beginning of. The total dataset comprises over 500,000 perceptual judgments. This allows us to ask questions about how American English listeners use acoustic cues as they become available over time for all possible combinations of sounds. A complementary study on Dutch is available from Warner, Smits, McQueen, and Cutler’s previous work. We have made this data publicly available. In the current talk, I will address several effects on perception, such as the effect of vowel stress, the effect of phonological environment, and the effect of segment probability. The perceptual data also forms the input to the Shortlist-B model of spoken word recognition.

Join us Monday, Oct. 23, at 1pm in the Field Lab to hear Andy Wedel (University of Arizona) speak about Signal evolution within the word. Here’s an abstract.

Languages have been shown to optimize their lexicons over time with respect to the amount of signal allocated to words relative to their informativity: words that are on average less predictable in context tend to be longer, while those that are on average more predictable tend to be shorter (Piantadosi et al 2011, cf. Zipf 1935).

Further, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners are able to incrementally process words as they are heard, progressively updating inferences about what word is intended as the phonetic signal unfolds in time. As a consequence, phonetic cues early in the signal for a word are more informative about word-identity because they are less constrained by previous segmental context. This suggests that languages should not only optimize the total amount of signal allocated to different words, but optimize the distribution of that information across the word relative to existing competitors in the lexicon. Specifically, words that are on average less predictable in context should evolve highly informative phonetic cues early in the word, while tending to preserve a ‘long tail’ of redundant cues later in the word. In this talk I will review recent work in our group showing that these predictions are borne out in several languages.

I will also present recent statistical work in our group supporting the hypothesis that languages tend to develop phonological rules which enhance phonetic cue informativity at the beginnings of words, but reduce cue informativity later in words. I will argue that this typological tendency plausibly arises from the word-level tendency to preserve higher informativity cues at word beginnings.

Mondays 1-2pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays, 10am, Field Lab

Mondays 11am to 12pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays, 12-1, Phonetics Lab, unless otherwise noted

Week 2 (Apr 6): Hammond et al. (2014), “Vowel insertion in Scottish Gaelic”
Week 3 (Apr 13): Bosch & de Jong (1997), “The prosody of Barra Gaelic epenthetic vowels”
Week 4 (Apr 20): Karla Barranco-Marquez practice poster presentation
Week 5 (Apr 27): Gerfen (2001), “A critical view of Licensing by Cue: codas and obstruents in Andalusian Spanish”
Week 6 (May 4):
Week 7 (May 11):
Week 8 (May 18):
Week 9 (May 25):
Week 10 (Jun 1):

On deck:
Iosad (2012), “‘Pitch accent’ and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic:
historical implications” (slides)
Iosad (to appear), “‘Pitch accent’ and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic:
reassessing the role of contact” (paper)

For reference:
Scottish Gaelic Grammar Wiki, “Theoretical Treatments of Epenthesis”
Hall (2003), “Gestures and segments: vowel intrusion as overlap”
Hall (2006), “Cross-linguistic patterns of vowel intrusion”
Hall (2011), “Vowel Epenthesis“

Wednesdays, 11-12, Phonetics Lab, unless otherwise noted

Week 2 (Jan 14): Eric: “Exceptionality in Spanish stress” (practice talk for OCP workshop on exceptions)
Week 3 (Jan 21): Kati (& Eric): “Two approaches to exceptionality in Mushunguli” (practice talk for OCP workshop on exceptions)
Week 4 (Jan 28): Amanda (& Jasmeen) on Punjabi (ICPhS)
Week 5 (Feb 4): Marc & Scott on codas (ICPhS)
Week 6 (Feb 11): OPEN
Week 7 (Feb 18): Discussion of Steriade (1999), “Alternatives to the syllabic interpretation of consonantal phonotactics“.
Week 8 (Feb 25): Andrés: “Nahuatl Palatal Glides” (practice talk for 2nd International Conference on Mesoamerican Linguistics
Week 9 (Mar 4): Kevin on Saami vowels
Week 10 (Mar 11): Amanda (& Grant & Marc): “Prosody and the that-trace effect: an experimental study” (practice talk for WCCFL 33)