Accent-independent adaptation to foreign accented speech.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Baese-Berk MM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3579861 | biostudies-other | 2013 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Similar Datasets
Project description:This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker.
| S-EPMC4373278 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Daily speech communication often takes place in suboptimal listening conditions, in which interlocutors typically need to segregate the target signal from the background sounds. The present study investigated the influence on speech recognition of a relatively familiar foreign accent in background speech (Exp. 1) and whether short-term immediate exposure to the target talker's voice (Exp. 2) or the background babble (Exp. 3) would either help or hinder the segregation of target from background. A total of 72 native Dutch participants were asked to listen to Dutch target sentences in the presence of Dutch or German-accented Dutch babble without (Exp. 1) or with (Exps. 2 and 3) an exposure phase. Their task was to write down what they heard. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that listeners gained a release from masking when the background speech was accented, indicating that dissimilar and less familiar signals are easier to segregate effectively. Experiment 2 demonstrated that short-term immediate exposure to the target talker had no effect on speech-in-speech recognition, whereas exposure to the background babble could hinder separating the target voice from the background speech (Exp. 3). However, this reduced release from masking only appeared in the more difficult and more familiar babble condition (Dutch in Dutch), in which the speech recognition system may have remained attuned to the babble as a potential source of communicatively relevant information. Overall, this research provides evidence that both short-term adaptation and the degrees of target-background similarity and familiarity are of importance for speech-in-speech recognition.
| S-EPMC6675911 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Although foreign accents can be highly dissimilar to native speech, existing research suggests that listeners readily adapt to foreign accents after minimal exposure. However, listeners often report difficulty understanding non-native accents, and the time-course and specificity of adaptation remain unclear. Across five experiments, we examined whether listeners could use a newly learned feature of a foreign accent to eliminate lexical competitors during online speech perception. Participants heard the speech of a native English speaker and a native speaker of Québec French who, in English, pronounces /i/ as [i] (e.g., weak as wick) before all consonants except voiced fricatives. We examined whether listeners could learn to eliminate a shifted /i/-competitor (e.g., weak) when interpreting the accented talker produce an unshifted word (e.g., wheeze). In four experiments, adaptation was strikingly limited, though improvement across the course of the experiment and with stimulus variations indicates learning was possible. In a fifth experiment, adaptation was not improved when a native English talker produced the critical vowel shift, demonstrating that the limitation is not simply due to the fact the accented talker was non-native. These findings suggest that although listeners can arrive at the correct interpretation of a foreign accent, this process can pose significant difficulty.
| S-EPMC3763963 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Does listening to a foreign-accented speaker bias native speakers' behavior? We investigated whether the accent, i.e., a foreign accent versus a native accent, in which a social norm is presented affects native speakers' decision to respect the norm (Experiments 1 and 2) and the judgement for not respecting it (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we presented 128 native Spanish speakers with new social norms, adapted from the measures imposed by the Spanish Government to fight the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., 'To avoid the spread of the Covid-19 virus, keep your distance'), whereas in Experiment 2, we presented 240 native Spanish speakers with everyday social norms learned from childhood (e.g., 'Not littering on the street or in public places'), that have an intrinsic cultural and linguistic link. In Experiment 1, the norms were uttered either in a native accent, or in a foreign accent unfamiliar to our participants to avoid stereotypes. In Experiment 2, we added an accent negatively perceived in Spain to assess the role of language attitudes on decision making. Overall, accent did not directly impact participants' final decisions, but it influenced the decision-making process. The factors that seem to underlie this effect are emotionality and language attitudes. These findings add up to the recent Foreign Accent effect observed on moral judgements and further highlight the role of the speaker's identity in decision making.
| S-EPMC9534425 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Foreign accents have been shown to have considerable impact on how language is processed [1]. However, the impact of a foreign accent on semantic processing is not well understood. Conflicting results have been reported by previous event-related potential (ERP) studies investigating the impact of foreign-accentedness on the N400 effect elicited by semantic violations. Furthermore, these studies have only examined a subset of the four characteristics of the N400 (i.e. onset latency, latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution), and have been conducted in linguistic environments where foreign-accented speech is relatively uncommon. The current study therefore compared the N400 effect elicited by semantic violations in native Australian English vs. Mandarin-accented English, in a context where foreign-accented speech is common. Factors which may be responsible for individual variability in N400 amplitude were also investigated. The results showed no differences between the N400s elicited by native and foreign-accented speech in any of the four aforementioned characteristics. However, the analysis of individual variability revealed an effect of familiarity with foreign-accented speech on the amplitude of N400 effects for semantic violations. An effect of working memory capacity on N400 amplitude was also found. These findings highlight the relevance of the ambient linguistic environment for studies of speech processing, and demonstrate the interacting influences of both speaker- and listener-related factors on semantic processing.
| S-EPMC6281179 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The brain is adaptive. The speed of propagation through air, and of low-level sensory processing, differs markedly between auditory and visual stimuli; yet the brain can adapt to compensate for the resulting cross-modal delays. Studies investigating temporal recalibration to audiovisual speech have used prolonged adaptation procedures, suggesting that adaptation is sluggish. Here, we show that adaptation to asynchronous audiovisual speech occurs rapidly. Participants viewed a brief clip of an actor pronouncing a single syllable. The voice was either advanced or delayed relative to the corresponding lip movements, and participants were asked to make a synchrony judgement. Although we did not use an explicit adaptation procedure, we demonstrate rapid recalibration based on a single audiovisual event. We find that the point of subjective simultaneity on each trial is highly contingent upon the modality order of the preceding trial. We find compelling evidence that rapid recalibration generalizes across different stimuli, and different actors. Finally, we demonstrate that rapid recalibration occurs even when auditory and visual events clearly belong to different actors. These results suggest that rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual speech is primarily mediated by basic temporal factors, rather than higher-order factors such as perceived simultaneity and source identity.
| S-EPMC4375877 | biostudies-literature
Project description:CRISPR-Cas (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats coupled with CRISPR-associated proteins) is a bacterial immunity system that protects against invading phages or plasmids. In the process of CRISPR adaptation, short pieces of DNA ('spacers') are acquired from foreign elements and integrated into the CRISPR array. So far, it has remained a mystery how spacers are preferentially acquired from the foreign DNA while the self chromosome is avoided. Here we show that spacer acquisition is replication-dependent, and that DNA breaks formed at stalled replication forks promote spacer acquisition. Chromosomal hotspots of spacer acquisition were confined by Chi sites, which are sequence octamers highly enriched on the bacterial chromosome, suggesting that these sites limit spacer acquisition from self DNA. We further show that the avoidance of self is mediated by the RecBCD double-stranded DNA break repair complex. Our results suggest that, in Escherichia coli, acquisition of new spacers largely depends on RecBCD-mediated processing of double-stranded DNA breaks occurring primarily at replication forks, and that the preference for foreign DNA is achieved through the higher density of Chi sites on the self chromosome, in combination with the higher number of forks on the foreign DNA. This model explains the strong preference to acquire spacers both from high copy plasmids and from phages.
| S-EPMC4561520 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Perceptual adaptation to a talker enables listeners to efficiently resolve the many-to-many mapping between variable speech acoustics and abstract linguistic representations. However, models of speech perception have not delved into the variety or the quantity of information necessary for successful adaptation, nor how adaptation unfolds over time. In three experiments using speeded classification of spoken words, we explored how the quantity (duration), quality (phonetic detail), and temporal continuity of talker-specific context contribute to facilitating perceptual adaptation to speech. In single- and mixed-talker conditions, listeners identified phonetically-confusable target words in isolation or preceded by carrier phrases of varying lengths and phonetic content, spoken by the same talker as the target word. Word identification was always slower in mixed-talker conditions than single-talker ones. However, interference from talker variability decreased as the duration of preceding speech increased but was not affected by the amount of preceding talker-specific phonetic information. Furthermore, efficiency gains from adaptation depended on temporal continuity between preceding speech and the target word. These results suggest that perceptual adaptation to speech may be understood via models of auditory streaming, where perceptual continuity of an auditory object (e.g., a talker) facilitates allocation of attentional resources, resulting in more efficient perceptual processing.
| S-EPMC6732236 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Speech understanding can be thought of as inferring progressively more abstract representations from a rapidly unfolding signal. One common view of this process holds that lower-level information is discarded as soon as higher-level units have been inferred. However, there is evidence that subcategorical information about speech percepts is not immediately discarded, but is maintained past word boundaries and integrated with subsequent input. Previous evidence for such subcategorical information maintenance has come from paradigms that lack many of the demands typical to everyday language use. We ask whether information maintenance is also possible under more typical constraints, and in particular whether it can facilitate accent adaptation. In a web-based paradigm, participants listened to isolated foreign-accented words in one of three conditions: subtitles were displayed concurrently with the speech, after speech offset, or not displayed at all. The delays between speech offset and subtitle presentation were manipulated. In a subsequent test phase, participants then transcribed novel words in the same accent without the aid of subtitles. We find that subtitles facilitate accent adaptation, even when displayed with a 6 second delay. Listeners thus maintained subcategorical information for sufficiently long to allow it to benefit adaptation. We close by discussing what type of information listeners maintain-subcategorical phonetic information, or just uncertainty about speech categories.
| S-EPMC6080756 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study examines the effect of foreign-accented speech on the predictive ability of our brain. Listeners actively anticipate upcoming linguistic information in the speech signal so as to facilitate and reduce processing load. However, it is unclear whether or not listeners also do this when they are exposed to speech from non-native speakers. In the present study, we exposed native Dutch listeners to sentences produced by native and non-native speakers while measuring their brain activity using electroencephalography. We found that listeners' brain activity differed depending on whether they listened to native or non-native speech. However, participants' overall performance as measured by word recall rate was unaffected. We discussed the results in relation to previous findings as well as the automaticity of anticipation.
| S-EPMC7479827 | biostudies-literature