Variation across talkers in the acoustic-phonetic realization of speech sounds is a pervasive property of spoken language. The present study provides evidence that variation across talkers in the realization of American English stop consonants is highly structured. Positive voice onset time (VOT) was examined for all six word-initial stop categories in isolated productions of CVC syllables and ...

Speech is produced over time, and this makes sensitivity to timing between speech events crucial for understanding language. Two experiments investigated whether perception of function words (e.g., or, are) is rate dependent in casual speech, which often contains phonetic segments that are spectrally quite reduced. In Experiment 1, talkers spoke sentences containing a target function word; slow...

Noisy listening conditions are challenging to non-native listeners who typically perform poorly while attending to several competing talkers. This study examined whether nonnative listeners are able to utilize dialect-related cues in the target and in the masking speech, even if they do not reach the proficiency level of the native listeners. 35 Indonesian-English bilinguals residing in the Uni...

Age-related declines in understanding conversation may be largely a consequence of perceptual rather than cognitive declines. B. A. Schneider, M. Daneman, D. R. Murphy, and S. Kwong-See (2000) showed that age-related declines in comprehending single-talker discourse could be eliminated when adjustments were made to compensate for the poorer hearing of older adults. The authors used B. A. Schnei...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine listeners' ability to learn talker identity from speech produced with an electrolarynx, explore source and filter differentiation in talker identification, and describe acoustic-phonetic changes associated with electrolarynx use. METHOD Healthy adult control listeners learned to identify talkers from speech recordings produced using talkers' ...

Intelligibility of conversationally produced speech for normal hearing listeners was studied for three male and three female talkers. Four typical listening environments were used. These simulated a quiet living room, a classroom, and social events in two settings with different reverberation characteristics. For each talker, overall intelligibility and intelligibility for vowels, consonant voi...

The experiments reported here used auditory}visual mismatches to compare three approaches to speaker normalization in speech perception: radical invariance, vocal tract normalization, and talker normalization. In contrast to the "rst two, the talker normalization theory assumes that listeners' subjective, abstract impressions of talkers play a role in speech perception. Experiment 1 found that ...

One of the most fundamental aspects of learning a language is determining the mappings between words and referents. An often-overlooked complication is that infants interact with multiple individuals who may not produce words in the same way. In the present study, we explored whether 10to 12-month-olds can use talker-specific knowledge to infer the intended referents of novel labels. During exp...

Previous auditory perturbation studies have demonstrated that talkers spontaneously compensate for real-time formant-shifts by altering formant production in a manner opposite to the perturbation. Here, two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of amplitude of perturbation on the compensatory behavior for the vowel /epsilon/. In the first experiment, 20 male talkers received three st...