Both native and non-native disfluencies trigger listeners' attention (original) (raw)
Related papers
Native ‘um’s elicit prediction of low-frequency referents, but non-native ‘um’s do not
Journal of Memory and Language, 2014
Speech comprehension involves extensive use of prediction. Linguistic prediction may be guided by the semantics or syntax, but also by the performance characteristics of the speech signal, such as disfluency. Previous studies have shown that listeners, when presented with the filler uh, exhibit a disfluency bias for discourse-new or unknown referents, drawing inferences about the source of the disfluency. The goal of the present study is to study the contrast between native and non-native disfluencies in speech comprehension. Experiment 1 presented listeners with pictures of high-frequency (e.g., a hand) and lowfrequency objects (e.g., a sewing machine) and with fluent and disfluent instructions. Listeners were found to anticipate reference to low-frequency objects when encountering disfluency, thus attributing disfluency to speaker trouble in lexical retrieval. Experiment 2 showed that, when participants listened to disfluent non-native speech, no anticipation of low-frequency referents was observed. We conclude that listeners can adapt their predictive strategies to the (non-native) speaker at hand, extending our understanding of the role of speaker identity in speech comprehension.
Journal of Memory and Language, 2019
The associative account of this 'disfluency bias' proposes that listeners learn to associate disfluency with low-frequency referents based on prior exposure to non-arbitrary disfluency distributions (i.e., greater probability of low-frequency words after disfluencies). However, there is limited evidence for listeners actually tracking disfluency distributions online. The present experiments are the first to show that adult listeners, exposed to a typical or more atypical disfluency distribution (i.e., hearing a talker unexpectedly say uh before high-frequency words), flexibly adjust their predictive strategies to the disfluency distribution at hand (e.g., learn to predict high-frequency referents after disfluency). However, when listeners were presented with the same atypical disfluency distribution but produced by a non-native speaker, no adjustment was observed. This suggests pragmatic inferences can modulate distributional learning, revealing the flexibility of, and constraints on, distributional learning in incremental language comprehension.
Perception of disfluency: language differences and listener bias
2007
Abstract This paper describes a crosslinguistic disfluency perception experiment. We tested the recognizability of pause fillers and partial words in English, German and Mandarin. Subjects were speakers of English with no knowledge of Mandarin or German. We found that subjects could identify disfluent from fluent utterances at a level above chance. Pause fillers were easier to identify than partial words. Accuracy rates were highest for English, followed by German and then Mandarin.
Sensory and cognitive mechanisms of change detection in the context of speech
Brain Structure and Function, 2008
The aim of this study was to dissociate the contributions of memory-based (cognitive) and adaptationbased (sensory) mechanisms underlying deviance detection in the context of natural speech. Twenty healthy righthanded native speakers of English participated in an eventrelated design scan in which natural speech stimuli,
Acoustic Correlates of Cross-Linguistic Disfluency Perception
ling.upenn.edu
Can disfluencies be perceived across languages? Are there specific acoustic realizations that speakers use for crosslinguistic disfluency perception? We show that speakers are capable of perceiving disfluency in unknown languages, and that specific acoustic and temporal cues aid in disfluency perception. Duration features robustly explain differences in perception of disfluency. Pitch contours are correlated with differences in disfluency perception for different languages.
Disfluency effects in comprehension: How new information can become accessible
2007
In press). Disfluency effects in comprehension: how new information can become accessible. In Gibson, E., and Perlmutter, N. (Eds) The processing and acquisition of reference, MIT Press. Disfluency Effects in Comprehension 2 ABSTRACT Natural speech production often includes disfluencies, such as mid-utterance hesitations, filler words ("um", "uh"), repeated or repaired words, and pronouncing "the" as /thiy/ (rhyming with "tree") or "a" as /ey/ (rhyming with "say") ). Yet laboratory research typically ignores disfluency. We describe an on-going research program that demonstrates how disfluency information affects on-line reference comprehension. In two eyetracking experiments, listeners followed instructions like "Put the grapes below the candle. Now put {the / thiy uh} candle…" Their eye movements at the word "candle" in the second instruction revealed a preference for given objects when the instruction was fluent, and for new objects when the instruction was disfluent. An offline experiment supported the idea that the fluency or disfluency in the article affect listeners expectations about what the speaker is referring to. These results are discussed in terms of how disfluency affects the accessibility of referents during reference comprehension.
Native-language benefit for understanding speech-in-noise: The contribution of semantics
… Language and Cognition, 2009
Bilinguals are better able to perceive speech-in-noise in their native compared to their non-native language. This benefit is thought to be due to greater use of higher-level, linguistic context in the native language. Previous studies showing this have used sentences and do not allow us to determine which level of language contributes to this context benefit. Here, we used a new paradigm that isolates the SEMANTIC level of speech, in both languages of bilinguals. Results revealed that in the native language, a semantically related target word facilitates the perception of a previously presented degraded prime word relative to when a semantically unrelated target follows the prime, suggesting a specific contribution of semantics to the native language context benefit. We also found the reverse in the non-native language, where there was a disadvantage of semantic coext on word recognition, suggesting that such top-down, contextual information results in semantic interference in one's second language.
2021
This study examines the role of two influential theories of language processing, Surprisal Theory and Dependency Locality Theory (DLT), in predicting disfluencies (fillers and reparandums) in the Switchboard corpus of English conversational speech. Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models for this task, we incorporate syntactic factors (DLT-inspired costs and syntactic surprisal) in addition to lexical surprisal and duration, thus going beyond the local lexical frequency and predictability used in previous work on modelling word durations in Switchboard speech (Bell et al., 2003, 2009). Our results indicate that compared to fluent words, words preceding disfluencies tend to have lower lexical surprisal (hence higher activation levels) and lower syntactic complexity (low DLT costs and low syntactic surprisal except for reparandums). Disfluencies tend to occur before upcoming difficulties, i.e., high lexical surprisal words (low activation levels) with high syntactic complexity (high DLT...
The double function of disfluency phenomena in spontaneous speech
2001
Disfluency in spontaneous speech is the outcome of a speaker’s indecision about what to say next. The listener, however, is continuously adapted to both the language signals and the types of disfluency of the heard text. What is in the background of this adaptation process? This paper analyses the types and characteristics of the disfluency phenomena of a 78-minute spontaneous speech sample (produced by 10 adults). The author’s intention is to explain the characteristics of disharmony between speech planning and articulation within the speech production process. In order to explain the hypothesized double function of disfluency in terms of perceptual necessity from the listener’s side various experiments have been carried out. Three different samples of spontaneous speech have been selected for experimental purposes. Three groups of listeners (altogether 60 university students) participated in the experiments. One of the groups had to detect the instances of disfluency in the texts ...
Familiarity, expertise, and change detection: Change deafness is worse in your native language
Perception, 2014
We first replicated the language-familiarity effect for voice discrimination and found better voice discrimination in familiar languages. However, when listeners were not cued to listen for changes, both English and Spanish speakers exhibited greater change deafness in their familiar language. Results suggest that lexical/semantic attention in a familiar language and increased indexical processing in an unfamiliar language can produce greater change deafness in familiar languages.