@article {513,
	title = {Both Contextual and Talker-Bound F0 Information Affect Voiceless Fricative Perception},
	year = {2022},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands},
	abstract = {Speech perception is sensitive to context. An example of this is the contrastive effect of fundamental frequency (F0) on the perception of voiceless fricatives{\textquoteright} spectral center of gravity (CoG) (e.g., Niebuhr, 2017). However, whether knowledge about a talker{\textquoteright}s characteristic mean F0 can produce similar effects remains unknown. The present study therefore investigated the effects of contextual (Exp 1) and talker-bound (Exp 2) F0 information on the perception of the voiceless fricatives /s/ and /ʃ/. In Experiment 1, in a 2AFC task, native Dutch listeners (N=10) categorized target words as the Dutch words {\textquotedblleft}sok{\textquotedblright} /sɔk/ or {\textquotedblleft}sjok{\textquotedblright} /ʃɔk/ embedded in a carrier sentence ({\textquotedblleft}Nu komt het woord...{\textquotedblright}) in 3 intermixed F0 conditions. The fricatives were tokens from a synthetic 8-step fricative continuum from /s/ to /ʃ/. The carrier sentence was pitch shifted {\textpm}4 semitones to create High-F0 and Low-F0 context conditions, alongside a Mid-F0 (i.e., non-shifted) control condition. Ambiguous fricatives were perceived as more /s/-like in Low-F0 sentences compared to High-F0 sentences. In Experiment 2, new participants (N=32) first listened to 20 minutes of speech (exposure) from the same talker whose voice had been consistently pitch-shifted up (High-F0 group) or down (Low-F0 group) {\textpm}4 semitones. Afterwards, a 5-step subset of the original 8-step fricative continuum was used in a 2AFC task where participants categorized stimuli without carrier sentences as {\textquotedblleft}sok{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}sjok{\textquotedblright}. The continuum was again perceived as more /s/-like for the Low-F0 group compared to the High-F0 group. Together, the findings suggest that listeners use not only the immediate context but also previously established knowledge about talkers{\textquoteright} typical F0 to interpret incoming speech sounds.

References

Niebuhr, O. (2017). On the perception of {\textquotedblleft}segmental intonation{\textquotedblright}: F0 context effects on sibilant identification in German. EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing, 2017(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13636-017-0115-3
},
	author = {Ulu{\c s}ahin, Orhun and Hans Rutger Bosker and James M. McQueen and Meyer, Antje}
}
@article {512,
	title = {Recalibration of lexical stress perception can be driven by visual beat gestures},
	year = {2022},
	publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen},
	address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands},
	abstract = {Auditory speech is highly variable. Listeners may therefore use the visual modality to disambiguate ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, when repeatedly presented with an ambiguous sound /a?a/ midway between /aba/ and /ada/, paired with a video of a talker producing either /aba/ or /ada/, listeners recalibrate their perception of a later presented auditory /aba - ada/ continuum (Bertelson et al., 2003). Here we tested whether recalibration can also occur for lexical stress perception. In Experiment 1 participants were exposed to an ambiguously stressed token of /ka.nɔn/, perceptually midway between Dutch CAnon [strong-weak (SW); {\textquotedblleft}canon{\textquotedblright}] and kaNON [weak-strong (WS); {\textquotedblleft}cannon{\textquotedblright}], disambiguated either by a beat gesture aligned to the first or second syllable (visual). In a later test phase participant categorized an auditory CAnon {\textendash} kaNON lexical stress continuum. The results revealed that participants{\textquoteright} responses in the test phase shifted in the direction of the disambiguating beat gestures they saw in the exposure phase. In Experiment 2 participants were exposed to a different ambiguous word (/vo:r.na:m/) but tested on the same CAnon {\textendash} kaNON continuum, to test if the effect would also generalize to different words. However, results show that participants were not able to generalize. Ongoing work is investigating whether this generalization is modulated by acoustic distance. Nonetheless, the effect was clearly present across multiple auditory steps in Experiment 1. Therefore, we suggest that beat gestures can recalibrate lexical stress perception and thus have a long-lasting effect on auditory perception.},
	author = {Bujok, Ronny and Peeters, David and Meyer, Antje and Hans Rutger Bosker}
}
