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Free keywords:
speech rate, rate-dependent perception, rate normalization, habitual rate, self-produced speech
Abstract:
Interlocutors perceive phonemic category boundaries relative to talkers’ produced speech rates. For instance, a temporally ambiguous vowel between Dutch short /A/ and long /a:/ sounds short (i.e., as /A/) in a slow speech context, but long in a fast context. Besides the local contextual speech rate, listeners also track talker-specific habitual speech rates (Maslowski et al., in press). However, it is yet unclear whether self-produced speech rate modulates perception of another talker’s habitual rate. Such effects are potentially important, given that, in dialogue, a listener’s own speech often constitutes the context for the interlocutor’s speech. Three experiments addressed this question. In Experiment 1, one group of participants was instructed to speak fast, whereas another group had to speak slowly (16 participants per group). The two groups were then compared on their perception of ambiguous Dutch /A/-/a:/ vowels embedded in neutral rate speech from another talker. In Experiment 2, the same participants listened to playback of their own speech, whilst evaluating target vowels in neutral rate speech as before. Neither of these experiments provided support for the involvement of self-produced speech in perception of another talker's speech rate. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with a new participant sample, who were unfamiliar with the participants from the previous two experiments. Here, a group effect was found on perception of the neutral rate talker. This result replicates the finding of Maslowski et al. that habitual speech rates are perceived relative to each other (i.e., neutral rate sounds fast in the presence of a slower talker and vice versa), with naturally produced speech. Taken together, the findings show that self-produced speech is processed differently from speech produced by others. They carry implications for our understanding of the link between production and perception in dialogue.
