Contingent categorization in speech perception

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Issue Date
2014Author
Apfelbaum, Keith S.
Bullock-Rest, Natasha
Rhone, Ariane E.
Jongman, Allard
McMurray, Bob
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
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Show full item recordAbstract
The speech signal is notoriously variable, with the same phoneme realized differently depending on factors like talker and phonetic context. Variance in the speech signal has led to a proliferation of theories of how listeners recognize speech. A promising approach, supported by computational modeling studies, is contingent categorization, wherein incoming acoustic cues are computed relative to expectations. We tested contingent encoding empirically. Listeners were asked to categorize fricatives in CV syllables constructed by splicing the fricative from one CV syllable with the vowel from another CV syllable. The two spliced syllables always contained the same fricative, providing consistent bottom-up cues; however on some trials, the vowel and/or talker mismatched between these syllables, giving conflicting contextual information. Listeners were less accurate and slower at identifying the fricatives in mismatching splices. This suggests that listeners rely on context information beyond bottom-up acoustic cues during speech perception, providing support for contingent categorization.
Description
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Language Cognition and Neuroscience in 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01690965.2013.824995.
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Citation
Apfelbaum, K. S., Bullock-Rest, N., Rhone, A. E., Jongman, A., & McMurray, B. (2014). Contingent categorization in speech perception. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(9), 1070–1082. http://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.824995
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