Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Kim_Dissertation.pdf (1.61 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

The Production and Perception of Signal-Based Cues to Word Boundaries

Kim, Dahee
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173517

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
During speech comprehension, listeners must segment continuous speech into a series of discrete words. Previous studies of word segmentation have reported conflicting results as to whether talkers produce acoustic-phonetic cues demarcating word boundaries and whether the acoustic-phonetic details are sufficient to guarantee successful word segmentation by listeners. In this dissertation, we suggest that the conflicting results can be reconciled by considering acoustic-phonetic variation in the spoken language. Among the factors conditioning acoustic-phonetic variability, we focused on the influences of speech clarity and phonetic context on the production and perception of acoustic cues to word boundaries. Forty native speakers of American English read aloud sentences containing word-boundary ambiguities (e.g., collects gulls vs. collect skulls) to three "listener" confederates, who were a young native, a young nonnative, and an older hearing impaired listener introduced by a short video clip. The word-boundary ambiguities involved consonant-vowel, /s/-consonant, and schwa-consonant sequences and the consonants were balanced for obstruents and sonorants within each sequence type. Talkers silently read two sentences that were visually presented and read aloud the one of the two sentences that flashed. For half of the talkers, the two sentences presented on a trial were unrelated, while for the other talkers, the two sentences contained word-boundary minimal pairs. Clarity of acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundaries was estimated by the fit of logistic regression models predicting the location of word boundaries based on the durational properties of segments and pauses at and around the potential word boundaries. Statistical analyses of the model fit suggest that talkers adjust the extent to which they produce durational cues to word boundaries in that they enhance the clarity of word boundaries when speaking to listeners with foreseeable communication difficulties. The extent to which talkers clarified cues to word boundaries was constrained by the phonetic context surrounding word boundaries, as shown by the insufficiency of durational cues for distinguishing ambiguous schwa-initial sequences such as along vs. a long, regardless of speech clarity. Listening experiments tested whether and to what extent the talkers' clarity modulation of the acoustic-phonetic segmentation cues affected listeners' word segmentation. Listeners were shown to be more accurate and faster in determining the location of the word boundary when the talkers’ speech was directed to an older hearing impaired or a young nonnative listener than when speech was directed to a young native listener. In addition, listeners were better at determining the location of the word boundaries when the stimuli were produced by talkers who read the target sentences after reading the sentence pairs containing word-boundary minimal pairs than the stimuli produced by talkers who read the target sentences after reading sentence pairs that did not highlight the word-boundary ambiguity. The extent to which listeners benefited from enhanced speech clarity due to the listener confederates' linguistic background or talkers' awareness of the word-boundary ambiguity differed depending on the phonetic context surrounding the potential word boundaries. The results contribute to our understanding of variation in speech production and word segmentation.
Cynthia Clopper (Advisor)
Mark Pitt (Advisor)
Shari Speer (Committee Member)
171 p.
Linguistics

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kim, D. (2013). The Production and Perception of Signal-Based Cues to Word Boundaries [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173517

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kim, Dahee. The Production and Perception of Signal-Based Cues to Word Boundaries. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173517.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kim, Dahee. "The Production and Perception of Signal-Based Cues to Word Boundaries." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374173517

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1374173517
1,340
© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.