BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//events.la.psu.edu//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20201101T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20200308T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:16947-7dff65b31f1c24baf91e434171532e68@events.la.psu.edu DTSTAMP:20260911T173804Z DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210903T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210903T103000 SUMMARY:Emily Herman, Matt Carlson, Angelica Brill and Anne Olmstead - Did you s ay what I thought you said? Probing illusions in speech perception under different conditions DESCRIPTION:Did you say what I thought you said? Probing illusions in sp eech perception under different conditions\n\nRestrictions on how speech sound sequencing lead to well-documented "misperceptions" of non-native sound sequences. Listeners may appear to perceive additional sounds tha t are absent from the acoustic signal\, to ignore certain features that are present acoustically\, or to interpret some features differently\, a s compared to listeners whose native languages allow more transparent re presentations of the acoustic signal. Focusing on so-called perceptual i llusions\, where listeners seem to perceive an extra segment\, we explor e the hypothesis that these illusions are dependent on the context of pr ocessing. We take our cue from an early study by Miyawake\, et al (1975) in which Japanese listeners discriminated formant contours encoding the American English [r-l] contrast easily when presented as non-speech sou nds\, but exhibited the now well-documented difficulty in discriminating the same contrast when presented in a speech context. In this work in p rogress\, we will describe three experiments on Spanish speakers' percep tion of word-initial [s]-consonant sequences\, which do not occur in Spa nish\, and which are perceived by listeners from this population as begi nning with [e]\, despite the absence of any vocalic material in the acou stic signal (e.g. acoustic [spona] is perceived as [espona]\, Carlson\, et al.\, 2015\; Carlson\, 2018\; 2019\, inter alios). In the first exper iment\, we use a discrimination task using Spanish-sounding nonwords to ask how much phonological material is necessary to trigger the illusion\ , showing that it was not enough to present phonetic evidence for the sC cluster\, but the illusion only emerged when the stimuli presented coul d constitute a word in Spanish. In the second experiment\, we used lexic al decision to test English words such as school to which an initial vow el was sometimes added (e.g. eschool\, oschool)\, and the items were pre sented in either a native American English accented voice or a Spanish a ccented voice. This tested whether listeners could distinguish whether a n intrusive vowel had been produced\, at least by a speaker who would be otherwise unlikely to produce one (i.e. the native AE talker). This yie lded no evidence that Spanish speaking listeners applied this kind of so ciolinguistic knowledge in this task: they appeared to ignore the intrus ive [e]\, but not an intrusive [o]\, regardless of the talker. Neverthel ess\, the third experiment showed that they discriminated tokens with in trusive [e] vs. no intrusive vowel above chance. Experiment 3 was simila r to Experiment 1\, suggesting that discrimination may be better when li stening to English speech than when listening to Spanish\, and we are co nducting follow-up experiments to confirm this result. Our findings prov ide evidence that perceptual illusions such as that experienced by Spani sh listeners hearing sC clusters depend on the processing evnvironment\, including task demands and\, more interestingly\, the language being li stened to and sociolinguistic information about the talker.\n\nFor more details: https://events.la.psu.edu/event/emily-herman-matt-carlson-and-a nne-olmstead/ X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:

Did you say what I thought you said? Probing illusions in s peech perception under different conditions

Restrictions on how speech s ound sequencing lead to well-documented "misperceptions" of non-native s ound sequences. Listeners may appear to perceive additional sounds that are absent from the acoustic signal, to ignore certain features that are present acoustically, or to interpret some features differently, as com pared to listeners whose native languages allow more transparent represe ntations of the acoustic signal. Focusing on so-called perceptual illusi ons, where listeners seem to perceive an extra segment, we explore the h ypothesis that these illusions are dependent on the context of processin g. We take our cue from an early study by Miyawake, et al (1975) in whic h Japanese listeners discriminated formant contours encoding the America n English [r-l] contrast easily when presented as non-speech sounds, but exhibited the now well-documented difficulty in discriminating the same contrast when presented in a speech context. In this work in progress, we will describe three experiments on Spanish speakers' perception of wo rd-initial [s]-consonant sequences, which do not occur in Spanish, and w hich are perceived by listeners from this population as beginning with [ e], despite the absence of any vocalic material in the acoustic signal ( e.g. acoustic [spona] is perceived as [espona], Carlson, et al., 2015; C arlson, 2018; 2019, inter alios). In the first experiment, we use a disc rimination task using Spanish-sounding nonwords to ask how much phonolog ical material is necessary to trigger the illusion, showing that it was not enough to present phonetic evidence for the sC cluster, but the illu sion only emerged when the stimuli presented could constitute a word in Spanish. In the second experiment, we used lexical decision to test Engl ish words such as school to which an initial vowel was sometimes added (e.g. eschool, oschool), and the items were presente d in either a native American English accented voice or a Spanish accent ed voice. This tested whether listeners could distinguish whether an int rusive vowel had been produced, at least by a speaker who would be other wise unlikely to produce one (i.e. the native AE talker). This yielded n o evidence that Spanish speaking listeners applied this kind of sociolin guistic knowledge in this task: they appeared to ignore the intrusive [e ], but not an intrusive [o], regardless of the talker. Nevertheless, the third experiment showed that they discriminated tokens with intrusive [ e] vs. no intrusive vowel above chance. Experiment 3 was similar to Expe riment 1, suggesting that discrimination may be better when listening to English speech than when listening to Spanish, and we are conducting fo llow-up experiments to confirm this result. Our findings provide evidenc e that perceptual illusions such as that experienced by Spanish listener s hearing sC clusters depend on the processing evnvironment, including t ask demands and, more interestingly, the language being listened to and sociolinguistic information about the talker.

For more details: https://events.la.p su.edu/event/emily-herman-matt-carlson-and-anne-olmstead/

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