Native Listeners' Use of Information in Parsing Ambiguous Casual Speech.

In conversational speech, phones and entire syllables are often missing. This can make "he's" and "he was" homophonous, realized for example as [ɨz]. Similarly, "you're" and "you were" can both be realized as [jɚ], [ɨ], etc.

Neurological injury from virtual reality mishap.

Consumer virtual reality systems are becoming increasingly popular with the increasing availability of devices and gamified technologies. Self-sustained injury risks exist with the use of this technology in the uncontrolled home environment, however, the public awareness of these risks may not be recognised. We present a case of a low- impact virtual reality fall resulting in spinal cord injury, hypoglossal nerve injury, vertebral artery dissection and traumatic brain injury.

Reduced speech: All is variability.

Humans often communicate through reduced speech, where many sounds are altered or deleted. Even whole syllables or occasionally whole words can be deleted, as in the production [t jyt ɛ̃m] for do you have time shown in the visual abstract. Such reduction is more common in spontaneous, casual, conversational speech, but it occurs in connected speech in formal settings, and rarely even in careful word-list reading.

Stress Effects in Vowel Perception as a Function of Language-Specific Vocabulary Patterns.

Background/aims: Evidence from spoken word recognition suggests that for English listeners, distinguishing full versus reduced vowels is important, but discerning stress differences involving the same full vowel (as in mu- from music or museum) is not. In Dutch, in contrast, the latter distinction is important. This difference arises from the relative frequency of unstressed full vowels in the two vocabularies.

Individual differences in phonetic cue use in production and perception of a non-native sound contrast.

The current work examines native Korean speakers' perception and production of stop contrasts in their native language (L1, Korean) and second language (L2, English), focusing on three acoustic dimensions that are all used, albeit to different extents, in both languages: voice onset time (VOT), f0 at vowel onset, and closure duration. Participants used all three cues to distinguish the L1 Korean three-way stop distinction in both production and perception. Speakers' productions of the L2 English contrasts were reliably distinguished using both VOT and f0 (even though f0 is only a very weak cue to the English contrast), and, to a lesser extent, closure duration.

Individual differences in perceptual adaptability of foreign sound categories.

Listeners possess a remarkable ability to adapt to acoustic variability in the realization of speech sound categories (e.g., different accents).

Tracking perception of the sounds of English.

Twenty American English listeners identified gated fragments of all 2288 possible English within-word and cross-word diphones, providing a total of 538,560 phoneme categorizations. The results show orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal and provide a view of where information about segments occurs in time. Information locus depends on each speech sound's identity and phonological features.

Perceptual compensation for differences in speaking style.

It is well-established that listeners will shift their categorization of a target vowel as a function of acoustic characteristics of a preceding carrier phrase (CP). These results have been interpreted as an example of perceptual normalization for variability resulting from differences in talker anatomy. The present study examined whether listeners would normalize for acoustic variability resulting from differences in speaking style within a single talker.

Phonetic variability of stops and flaps in spontaneous and careful speech.

Variability is perhaps the most notable characteristic of speech, and it is particularly noticeable in spontaneous conversational speech. The current research examines how speakers realize the American English stops /p, k, b, g/ and flaps (ɾ from /t, d/), in casual conversation and in careful speech. Target consonants appear after stressed syllables (e.

Intonational structure as a word-boundary cue in Tokyo Japanese.

While listeners are recognizing words from the connected speech stream, they are also parsing information from the intonational contour. This contour may contain cues to word boundaries, particularly if a language has boundary tones that occur at a large proportion of word onsets. We investigate how useful the pitch rise at the beginning of an accentual phrase (APR) would be as a potential word-boundary cue for Japanese listeners.

Cues to perception of reduced flaps.

Natural, spontaneous speech (and even quite careful speech) often shows extreme reduction in many speech segments, even resulting in apparent deletion of consonants. Where the flap ([inverted J]) allophone of /t/ and /d/ is expected in American English, one frequently sees an approximant-like or even vocalic pattern, rather than a clear flap. Still, the /t/ or /d/ is usually perceived, suggesting the acoustic characteristics of a reduced flap are sufficient for perception of a consonant.

Unfolding of phonetic information over time: a database of Dutch diphone perception.

We present the results of a large-scale study on speech perception, assessing the number and type of perceptual hypotheses which listeners entertain about possible phoneme sequences in their language. Dutch listeners were asked to identify gated fragments of all 1179 diphones of Dutch, providing a total of 488,520 phoneme categorizations. The results manifest orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal.