TY - JOUR
T1 - Speaking rate normalization across different talkers in the perception of Japanese stop and vowel length contrasts
AU - Kato, Misaki
AU - Kawahara, Shigeto
AU - Idemaru, Kaori
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 International Speech Communications Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization depends on a specific talker's voice is still understudied. The present study investigated whether listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: Japanese singleton-geminate stop contrast (/k/-/kk/) and short-long vowel contrast (/e/-/ee/). The vowel contrast carries more reliable talker information than the stop contrast; hence, listeners' rate-based adjustments may be more talker-specific for vowels than for stops. The current results showed that context speaking rate impacted the perception of the target contrast across different talkers, and this influence was evident for both types of the contrasts tested. These results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target segment carried reliable talker information (i.e., vowel contrast) or not (i.e., stop contrast). The current results bear on the issue of how speaking rate information is processed with respect to talker information.
AB - Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization depends on a specific talker's voice is still understudied. The present study investigated whether listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: Japanese singleton-geminate stop contrast (/k/-/kk/) and short-long vowel contrast (/e/-/ee/). The vowel contrast carries more reliable talker information than the stop contrast; hence, listeners' rate-based adjustments may be more talker-specific for vowels than for stops. The current results showed that context speaking rate impacted the perception of the target contrast across different talkers, and this influence was evident for both types of the contrasts tested. These results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target segment carried reliable talker information (i.e., vowel contrast) or not (i.e., stop contrast). The current results bear on the issue of how speaking rate information is processed with respect to talker information.
KW - Categorical perception
KW - Japanese
KW - Length contrast
KW - Speaking rate
KW - Speech perception
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U2 - 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-13
DO - 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-13
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85093902847
VL - 2020-May
SP - 61
EP - 65
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody
JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody
SN - 2333-2042
T2 - 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020
Y2 - 25 May 2020 through 28 May 2020
ER -