28.5070, Diss: English; Computational Linguistics; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholinguistics;Text/Corpus Linguistics: Kevin Tang: ''Naturalistic speech misperception''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-5070. Mon Dec 04 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.5070, Diss: English; Computational Linguistics; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholinguistics;Text/Corpus Linguistics: Kevin Tang: ''Naturalistic speech misperception''

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Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2017 12:12:30
From: Kevin Tang [linguist at kevintang.org]
Subject: Naturalistic speech misperception

 
Institution: University College London 
Program: PhD in Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2015 

Author: Kevin Tang

Dissertation Title: Naturalistic speech misperception 

Dissertation URL:  www.searproject.org

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Dissertation Director(s):
Andrew Nevins
Stuart Rosen
John Harris
Bert Vaux
Anne Cutler

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis presents a new corpus containing ≈ 5,000 instances of naturally
occurring misperception of conversational English, which is the result of a
standardised format for the orthographic and phonetic transcriptions and
meta-data of existing naturalistic corpora. Available at the SEAR Project
(www.searproject.org)

I examined top-down phonetic/phonological factors and bottom-up lexical
factors for their contributions in naturalistic settings. On the feature
level, voicing/place/manner confusions were best explained using sonority,
featural underspecification (Lahiri and Reetz, 2002) and markedness (Lombardi,
2002), and vowel height/backness confusions using perceived similarity
(Steriade, 2001) and chain shifts (Labov, 1994a).

On the segment level, I found that confusions can be explained with
acoustic/featural distances, and extreme signal-to-noise ratio and narrow
bandwidth were less ecologically valid. Furthermore, three well-known sound
changes (TH-fronting, velar nasal fronting and back vowel fronting) were
consistently found in naturalistic and experimental data.

On the syllable level, codas are more likely to be misperceived than
nuclei/onsets for monosyllables, but onsets are more likely to be misperceived
for polysyllables. Fewer errors occur in the stressed syllables than in
unstressed syllables in polysyllabic words, but not monosyllables. Initial
syllables are more likely to be misperceived than medial syllables, which in
turn are more prone to misperception than final syllables.

On the word level, listeners were found to perceive a word of similar
frequency as the intended word in a misperception -- but crucially not a more
frequent word. This supports the graceful degradation account of a
malfunctioning system (Vitevitch, 2002). On the utterance level, listeners
were sensitive to the predictability of a word, suggesting that less
predictable words are more likely to be misperceived.

Together, these analyses establish the naturalistic corpus as an ecologically
valid resource and a benchmark of misperception, bridge the gap between
experimental and naturalistic studies, and highlight the need of examining
misperception with units larger than nonsense syllables.




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