Technical Programme

This is the final programme for this session. For oral sessions, the timing on the left is the current presentation order, but this may still change, so please check at the conference itself. If you have signed in to My Schedule, you can add papers to your own personalised list.

Wed-Ses2-O1:
Word-level perception

Time:	Wednesday 13:30	Place:	Main Hall	Type:	Oral
Chair:	Jeesun Kim

13:30	Semantic context effects in the recognition of acoustically unreduced and reduced words Marco van de Ven (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands) Benjamin V. Tucker (University of Alberta, Canada) Mirjam Ernestus (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Listeners require context to understand the casual pronunciation variants of words that are typical of spontaneous speech (Ernestus et al., 2002). The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments, investigating listeners' use of semantic contextual information in the comprehension of unreduced and reduced words. We found a strong semantic priming effect for low frequency unreduced words, whereas there was no such effect for reduced words. Word frequency was facilitatory for all words. These results show that semantic context is relevant especially for the comprehension of unreduced words, which is unexpected given the listener driven explanation of reduction in spontaneous speech.
13:50	Context effects and the processing of ambiguous words: Further evidence from semantic incongruence Michael C. W. Yip (The Hong Kong Institute of Education) A cross-modal naming experiment was conducted to further verify the effects of context and other lexical information in the processing of Chinese homophones during spoken language comprehension. In this experiment, listeners named aloud a visual probe as fast as they could, at a pre-designated point upon hearing the sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results further support that context has exerted an effect on the disambiguation of various homophonic meanings at an early stage, within the acoustic boundary of the word. This contextual effect was even stronger than the tonal information. Finally, the present results are in line with the context-dependency hypothesis that selection of the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the simultaneous interaction among sentential, tonal and other lexical information during lexical access.
14:10	The roles of reconstruction and lexical storage in the comprehension of regular pronunciation variants Mirjam Ernestus (Radboud University Nijmegen & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) This paper investigates how listeners process regular pronunciation variants, resulting from simple general reduction processes. Study 1 shows that when listeners are presented with new words, they store the pronunciation variants presented to them, whether these are unreduced or reduced. Listeners thus store information on word-specific pronunciation variation. Study 2 suggests that if participants are presented with regularly reduced pronunciations, they also reconstruct and store the corresponding unreduced pronunciations. These unreduced pronunciations apparently have special status. Together the results support hybrid models of speech processing, assuming roles for both exemplars and abstract representations.
14:30	Lexical Embedding in Spoken Dutch Odette Scharenborg (Centre for Language and Speech Technology, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Stefanie Okolowski (University of Trier, Germany) A stretch of speech is often consistent with multiple words, e.g., the sequence /hæm/ is consistent with ‘ham’ but also with the first syllable of ‘hamster’, resulting in temporary ambiguity. However, to what degree does this lexical embedding occur? Analyses on two corpora of spoken Dutch showed that 11.9%-19.5% of polysyllabic word tokens have word-initial embedding, while 4.1%-7.5% of monosyllabic word tokens can appear word-initially embedded. This is much lower than suggested by an analysis of a large dictionary of Dutch. Speech processing thus appears to be simpler than one might expect on the basis of statistics on a dictionary.
14:50	Real-time lexical competitions during speech-in-speech comprehension Véronique Boulenger (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS UMR 5596, Lyon, France) Michel Hoen (Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, INSERM U846, Lyon, France) François Pellegrino (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS UMR 5596, Lyon, France) Fanny Meunier (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, CNRS UMR 5596, Lyon, France) This study investigates speech comprehension in competing multi-talker babble. We examined the effects of number of simultaneous talkers and of frequency of words in the babble on lexical decision to target words. Results revealed better performance at a low talker number (n = 2). Importantly, frequency of words in the babble significantly affected performance: high frequency word babble interfered more strongly with word recognition than low frequency babble. This informational masking was particularly salient for the 2-talker babble. These findings suggest that investigating speech-in-speech comprehension may provide crucial information on lexical competition processes that occur in real-time during word recognition.
15:10	Discovering consistent word confusions in noise Martin Cooke (Ikerbasque and University of the Basque Country) Listeners make mistakes when communicating under adverse conditions, with overall error rates reasonably well-predicted by existing speech intelligibility metrics. However, a detailed examination of confusions made by a majority of listeners is more likely to provide insights into processes of normal word recognition. The current study measured the rate at which robust misperceptions occurred for highly-confusable words embedded in noise. In a second experiment, confusions discovered in the first listening test were subjected to a range of manipulations designed to help identify their cause. These experiments reveal that while majority confusions are quite rare, they occur sufficiently often to make large-scale discovery worthwhile. Surprisingly few misperceptions were due solely to energetic masking by the noise, suggesting that speech and noise react in complex ways which are not well-described by traditional masking concepts.