Sieb G. Nooteboom

Opposite effects of accentuation and deaccentuation on verification latencies for given and new information

Abstract Accentuation results in faster recognition of words expressing new (focal) information. To find out whether accentuation speeds up the comprehension of words expressing given information as well, the presence or absence of accents was varied independently for these categories in three experiments. Degree of Givenness was varied across experiments. Listeners verified spoken descriptions of pictures. Accentuation was found to interact with the Given/New variable: Given information was verified faster when the word expressing it was unaccented, New information was verified faster when the word expressing it was accented. These findings suggest that listeners do not simply give more attention to accented words, but rather process accented and unaccented words in different ways. It is hypothesized that the presence of an accent leads the listener to give primary attention to the acoustic/phonetic properties of the word and to construct an interpretation from the bottom up, and that the absence of an a...

Storage and Computation in the Language Faculty

Contributing authors. Preface. Acknowledgment. 1. Minimising or maximising storage? An introduction. S. Nooteboom, et al. Part I: Setting the stage. 2. Whats in the lexicon? R. Jackendoff. Part II: Accessing regular and irregular word forms. 3. Dutch inflection: The rules that prove the exception. H. Baayen, et al. 4. Words, rules and stems in the Italian mental lexicon. T. Say, H. Clahsen. Part III: Changing the rules. 5. The balance between storage and computation in phonology. G. Booij. 6. Computation and storage in language contact P. Muysken. Part IV: Pronouncing spoken words. 7. Storage and computation in spoken word production. A. Roelofs. Part V: Buffering and computing. 8. Effects of short-term storage in processing rightward movement P. Ackema, A. Neeleman. 9. Storage and computation in sentence processing. A neuroimaging perspective. E. Kaan, L. Stowe. Part VI: Computing and storing aspects of discourse. 10. Computation and storage in discourse interpretation. N. Asher. Subject Index. Author Index.

Lexical bias revisited: Detecting, rejecting and repairing speech errors in inner speech ☆

Abstract This paper confirms and exploits the observation that early overt self-interruptions and repairs of phonological speech errors very likely are reactions to inner speech, not to overt speech. In an experiment eliciting word–word and nonword–nonword phonological spoonerisms it is found that self-interruptions and repairs come in two classes, one class of reactions to inner speech, another with reactions to overt speech. It is also found that in inner speech nonword–nonword spoonerisms are more often rejected than word–word spoonerisms. This is mirrored in the set of completed spoonerisms where word–word spoonerisms are more frequent than nonword–nonword ones. This finding supports a classical but controversial explanation of the well-known lexical bias effect from nonwords being rejected more frequently than real words in inner speech. This explanation is further supported by an increasing number of overt rejections of nonword–nonword spoonerisms with phonetic distance between error and target, and increasing lexical bias with phonetic distance. It is concluded that the most likely cause of lexical bias in phonological speech errors is that nonword errors are more often detected, rejected, and repaired than real-word errors in self-monitoring of inner speech.

What Makes Speakers Omit Pitch Accents? An Experiment

The present paper reports on an experiment which was set up to examine whether we can make a speaker either accent or de-accent particular words by systematically varying the objective probability that a particular referent will be mentioned (and therewith the referents predictability for speaker and listener). In the experiment each of 24 speakers was asked to watch a visual display, showing a very simple configuration of letter symbols, and to describe orally each change in the current configuration to a listener. By manipulating the letter configurations shown on the display, the objective probability that the speaker would mention a particular letter could be controlled. Letters could either move around on the screen (moving letters) or remain fixed and serve as spatial reference points (fixed letters). Objective probabilities were 0.5 and 1 for both moving letters and fixed letters. The main findings were the following: (1) When a referent is fully predictable to speaker and listener there is a high proportion of ellipsis, particularly for the moving letter, which was always referred to from subject position. (2) The probability that a word referring to a letter will be accented appears not to be immediately controlled by the predictability of the referent. The controlling factor is rather the preceding linguistic context. More specifically, the probability of accenting, being close to 1 the first time a specific referent is mentioned, sharply decreases when the same referent is mentioned for the second time in a row, and decreases again when this same referent is mentioned three or more times in a row. However, as soon as the competing referent is mentioned once, in the same role (moving or fixed letter), the probability of accenting jumps up again. (3) The probability of accenting is systematically lower for the moving letters in subject position (average 0.32) than for the fixed letters in predicate position (average 0.52). In view of these findings, de-accenting, defined as conspicuously omitting an accent on a word that, for grammatical reasons, otherwise would have been accented, is interpreted as a device which can be used by a cooperative speaker for helping the listener to find the intended referent as easily and quickly as possible. It is supposed that speakers not using this device systematically give their listeners a harder time.

Word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech: prosodic and segmental factors

In this study we investigate whether speakers, in line with the predictions of the Hyper- and Hypospeech theory, speed up most during the least informative parts and less during the more informative parts, when they are asked to speak faster. We expected listeners to benefit from these changes in timing, and our main goal was to find out whether making the temporal organisation of artificially time-compressed speech more like that of natural fast speech would improve intelligibility over linear time compression. Our production study showed that speakers reduce unstressed syllables more than stressed syllables, thereby making the prosodic pattern more pronounced. We extrapolated fast speech timing to even faster rates because we expected that the more salient prosodic pattern could be exploited in difficult listening situations. However, at very fast speech rates, applying fast speech timing worsens intelligibility. We argue that the non-uniform way of speeding up may not be due to an underlying communicative principle, but may result from speakers inability to speed up otherwise. As both prosodic and segmental information contribute to word recognition, we conclude that extrapolating fast speech timing to extremely fast rates distorts this balance between prosodic and segmental information. 2002 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Coping with gradient forms of /t/-deletion and lexical ambiguity in spoken word recognition

This study investigates how listeners cope with gradient forms of deletion of word-final /t/ when recognising words in a phonological context that makes /t/-deletion viable. A corpus study confirmed a high incidence of /t/-deletion in an /st#b/ context in Dutch. A discrimination study showed that differences between released /t/, unreleased /t/ and fully deleted /t/ in this specific /st#b/ context were salient. Two on-line experiments were carried out to investigate whether lexical activation might be affected by this form variation. Even though unreleased and released variants were processed equally fast by listeners, a detailed analysis of the unreleased condition provided evidence for gradient activation. Activating a target ending in /t/ is slowest for the most reduced variant because phonological context has to be taken into account. Importantly, activation for a target with /t/ in the absence of cues for /t/ is reduced if there is a surface-matching lexical competitor.

Publications Received for Review

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A search for a word‐beginning superiority effect

This article reports two experiments examining whether or not auditory word recognition is more sensitive to word‐initial than to word‐final stimulus information. In the first experiment the contributions of prefixes and suffixes to word recognition were compared. These affixes carried widely varying amounts of lexical information and were added to somewhat degraded monomorphematic word stems in Dutch synthetic speech. Although there was a strong effect of lexical information on word recognition, no difference was found between the contributions of prefixes and suffixes. In the second experiment the effects of masking with noise of either initial or final parts of polysyllabic and monomorphematic synthesized Dutch words were compared. The amount of lexical redundancy carried by initial and final parts of words was the same. Again no difference was found. We conclude that the process of lexical activation during spoken‐word recognition is equally sensitive to word‐initial and word‐final stimulus informatio...

Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below

This paper reports some production and perception experiments challenging the idea that the rate of articulation of interpause intervals of speech is solely conditioned by internal phonological factors. The results reported demonstrate that, at least for one professional newsreader, rate of articulation in interpause intervals is conditioned by context and that deviations from the intended rate are easily noticeable and affect perceived naturalness negatively. It is also demonstrated that a context-conditioned rate of articulation does not affect interpause intervals uniformly but is unevenly distributed. These results are interpreted in terms of speaker adaptation to the listeners running access to signal-independent information.

The Phonetic Feature of Vowel Length in Dutch

A basic assumption of the research reported upon here is that measurable vowel duration is at least partly controlled by an independent phonetic feature of vowel length. We have studied manifestations of this feature by measuring articulatory segment durations of a number of Dutch short vowels, long vowels and diphthongs, in nonsense words of the form /pVpVpVp/ of which the second syllable was stressed. /V/ was the same vowel in each syllable. The /p/ durations and the total word durations were also measured. The durations were defined by the moments of lip opening and closure measured with a lip contact. The results can be explained by assuming that on a programming level of speech production there are only two possible specification values of the feature of vowel length for Dutch vowels, one for the short vowels /α, , œ, I, ε, u, y, i/ and one for the long vowels /a:, o:, ø:, e:/, plus the diphthongs /αu, Λy, εi/. The programming level of speech production is taken to correspond to the linguistic level of phonetic representation. Durational variations within each of the two phonetic categories of vowel length can be explained by peripheral properties of the speech production system. Variations due to stress and position are accounted for by assuming that prosodic patterns may affect the amount of deviation of the actual duration from the specified ideal duration.