In this study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the specificity of adaptation to real-time formant shifting. During the experiments, talkers were adapted to altered auditory feedback for one vowel (trained vowel) and received unaltered feedback for a different vowel (untrained vowel). In the first experiment, production of the untrained vowel was measured while the talker was in th...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Previous research found that individual talkers have consistent differences in the production of segments impacting the perception of their speech by others. Speakers also produce multiple acoustic-phonetic cues to phonological contrasts. Less is known about how multiple cues covary within a phonetic category and across talkers. We examined differences in individual talkers acro...

Compared to stress-timed English, mora-timed Japanese is characterized by a simpler syllabic structure and no vowel reduction. Such differences may explain some aspects of the problems that Japanese talkers have in producing English speech rhythm, i.e., an L1 influence on L2 rhythm production. The present study tested whether this L1 influence on L2 could be moderated by an increase in L2 exper...

This study investigated the relation between the internal structure of phonetic categories and consonant intelligibility. For two phonetic contrasts (/s/-/ʃ/ and /b/-/p/), 32 iterations per category were elicited for each of 40 talkers from a same accent group and age range, and measures of cross-category distance and within-category dispersion were obtained. These measures varied substantially...

Research on regional variation in the sound system of American English has focused almost exclusively on vowel quality (e.g., Labov et al. 2005; Thomas, 2001). However, several recent studies have provided preliminary evidence for regional variation in temporal organization, including speaking rate and pause distribution. The results of these studies suggest that Southerners speak more slowly (...

What aspects of the speech signal cause listeners to perceive a foreign accent? While many studies have explored this question for a single variety of non-native speech, few have simultaneously considered non-native speech from multiple native language backgrounds. In this perception study, American Englishspeaking listeners rated stop-vowel sequences extracted from English words produced by L1...

This study investigates masking effects occurring during speech comprehension in the presence of concurrent speech signals. We examined the differential effects of acoustic–phonetic and lexical content of 4to 8-talker babble (natural speech) or babble-like noise (reversed speech) on word identification. Behavioral results show a monotonic decrease in speech comprehension rates with an increasin...

Two groups of monolingual, native English-speaking listeners were trained to identify the voices of ten German-English bilingual talkers. One group of listeners learned to identify the voices from English stimuli only, while the other group learned to identify the talkers from German stimuli only. After four days of training, both groups of listeners were asked to identify the same talkers from...

It is known that talkers can be recognized by listening to their specific vocal qualities—breathiness and fundamental frequencies. However, talker identification also occur focusing on the talkers’ unique articulatory style, which available auditorily visually shared across modalities. Evidence shows voices heard while seeing faces are later better own compared alone. The present study investig...