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Is phonetic variation represented in memory for pitch accents ?Amelia E. Kimball Jennifer Cole Gary DellStefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel

ETAP 3May 28, 2015

H*discourse-newImportantsurprisingMany, varying acoustic cues to pitch accent.

What acoustic cues are listeners sensitive to? Pitch accentSpeakers imitate phonological features rather than phonetic details Mixdorff, Cole, Shattuck-Hufnagel 2012

Listeners perceive question/statement pitch accent categorically. ( in Catalan as measured with behavioral tasks and MMN ERP.)Borrs-Comes, Costa-Faidella, Prieto, and Escera 2012.

Listeners dont hear/remember prosodic information that is not meaningful in their language.French, Hungarian, and Finnish speakers (Peperkamp and Dupoux 2002)Polish speakers dont reliably differentiate between lexical stress patterns (Dohmahs, Knaus,Orzechowska,Weise 2012)

Previous evidence: Listeners are sensitive to phonological features, not phonetic form. Trasition: once categorization is formed, Strong filter dont even percieve things that dont map onto what we already know.

ALSO imitation tasks Mixdorff, Cole, Shattuck-Hufnagel 2012

3Yet listeners use phonetic detail in online processing to categorize phonemesERPVOT effects present through a late stage of perceptual processing (N1 component) independent of categories.

acoustic information is encoded continuously, independent of phonological information. Toscano, McMurray, Dennhardt, and Luck 2010

McMurray, Tanenhaus, Aslin 2002 Eyetracking

You can have your categories and continuious variation 4 recognition memory affected by fine-grained similarity relations among voices. Goldinger 1996

These effects hold even for non-linguistic background noise such as a dog barking.Pufal and Samuel 2014 Yet listeners encode acoustic detail in memory

Seemingly irrelevant information, such as an unattended background sound, is retained in memory and can facilitate subsequent speech perception.So what is encoded?5Beavers love building Beavers love building H* H*

ORPhonetic cues?Intensity, duration, F0

Phonological features?Pitch accents When listeners hear a word, what prosodic information do they encode in memory?two types of variation:Sensitivity to variation in the acoustic realization of pitch accent. Variation in listeners perception of acoustic features. MethodSame/Different task

Implemented online using Amazon Mechanical Turk and LMEDS (Mahrt 2013)193 total subjects participated in six separate experiments.

All subjects were self-reported native English speakers located in the United States.

Their ages ranged from19-59 (mean=31,s.d. 8.4).

Results reported here do not include subjects who did not finish the task (8) or self-reported bilinguals (5), leaving 30 subjects in each of the six experiments.

Subjects Two experimental tasksAX task Participants hear two words with one second of silence between. They click a button to indicate if these are the same recording or different recordings.

Delayed AX taskParticipants hear four words (exposure), then a tone, then one of the four words again (test). Participants are asked to say whether the exposure version they heard was the same as the test. Listeners Hear:

beaversmoviesrunnersbeetles

BEEP moviesListeners Hear:

beavers

beavers

AccentDuration PitchAXAccent AXDuration AXPitch AXAX DelayAccent DelayDuration Delay Pitch DelayAccent

Full sentences were recorded by a native English speaking linguist. Content words spliced from these sentences.12 words, 96 trials

beaversunaccentedaccentedIn a different trial, Listeners hear:

beaversPitch

beavers25 Hz lowered25 Hz raised pitch stylized to 10 Hz, manually moved up or down 25 Hz, creating a 50 Hz pitch difference resynthesized using PSOLA12 words, 96 trialsIn a different trial, Listeners hear:

Pitch Synchronus Overlap and Add11

Would inflate the difference. 12Duration

10% shortened10% lengthened20% duration difference.Pratt duration manipulation,10 words, 80 trialsIn a different trial, Listeners hear:

beavers

Subject choosesSAMEDIFFERENTFiles are SAMEhitmissDIFFERENTfalse alarmcorrect rejection

Predictions for delayed AX

Prediction

200

250

**N.S.chanceThese results hold with a mixed effect model. 19Interim summary

A small delay and interference before memory retrieval has a larger effect on subcategorical differences than on phonological differences.

Listeners encode (some) phonetic detail, not just phonological features.

20Individual variation

The standard deviation of scores in the AX pitch task was significantly higher than the standard deviation of scores in the AX duration task (F(29,29) =2.7492, p