Spectral contrast effects, the perceptual magnification of spectral differences between sounds, have been widely shown to influence speech categorization. However, whether talker information alters spectral contrast effects was recently debated [Laing, Liu, Lotto, and Holt, Front. Psychol. 3, 1-9 (2012)]. Here, contributions of reliable spectral properties, between-talker and within-talker vari...

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic validity of this conclusion. The lexicons (production...

Speech alignment is where talkers subconsciously adopt the speech and language patterns of their interlocutor. Nowadays, people all ages are speaking with voice-activated, artificially-intelligent (voice-AI) digital assistants through phones or smart speakers. This study examines participants’ age (older adults, 53–81 years old vs. younger 18–39 old) gender (female male) on degree during shadow...

An automatic speech recognition approach is presented which uses articulatory features estimated by a subject-independent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. The inversion allows estimation of articulatory features from any talker's speech acoustics using only an exemplary subject's articulatory-to-acoustic map. Results are reported on a broad class phonetic classification experiment on speech ...

A critical assumption of all current visual speech recognition systems is that there are visual speech units called visemes which can be mapped to units of acoustic speech, the phonemes. Despite there being a number of published maps it is infrequent to see the effectiveness of these tested, particularly on visual-only lip-reading (many works use audio-visual speech). Here we examine 120 mappin...

In repeating an utterance for the benefit of a listener, talkers can use contrastive stress to mark those parts of an utterance that were misrecognized. In this study, we found that talkers use a consistent set of markers to indicate contrastive stress: Listeners unaware of the nature of the misrecognition can readily identify a contrastively stressed word. Based on an analysis of these markers...

In this study, we investigated whether the intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production, known as “clear speech” produced by native and non-native talkers influenced speech intelligibility equally for native and non-native listeners. In a series of three experiments, we explored the effect of clear speech for various native and non-native talker and listener pairs. Combined, the results ...

Older talkers speak slower than young ones, but speech tempo has increased in the last decades. Have present-day older talkers slowed down with age or have they sped up with their community? This study investigates longitudinal patterns in articulation rate in formal speeches presented annually by Queen Beatrix between her ages 42 and 74. Her tempo decreased first and then increased in the last...