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Speaker-specific processing and local context information: The case of speaking rate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2015

EVA REINISCH
EVA REINISCH*
Affiliation:
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Eva Reinisch, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Schellingstraße 3, Munich 80799, Germany. E-mail: evarei@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
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Abstract

To deal with variation in the speech signal, listeners rely on local context, such as speaking rate in a carrier sentence directly preceding a target, as well as more global properties of the speech signal, such as speaker-specific pronunciation variants. The present study addressed whether, despite its variability even within one speaker, habitual speaking rate can be tracked as a speaker-specific property and how such speaker-specific tracking of habitual rate would interact with effects of local-rate normalization. In two experiments, listeners were exposed to a 2-min dialogue between a fast and a slow speaker. At test, listeners categorized minimal word pair continua differing in the German /a/–/a:/ duration contrast spoken by the same two speakers. The results showed that listeners responded with /a:/ more often for the fast speaker but only when words were presented in isolation and not when presented with additional local-rate information. That is, despite the general assumption that duration cues and speaking rate are too variable to be used in a speaker-specific fashion, tracking habitual speaking rate may help speech perception. The results are discussed in relation to a belief-updating model of perceptual adaptation and exemplar models.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 1397 - 1415
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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