Although the presence or absence of a pitch accent clearly can play an important role in signaling the discourse and information structure of an utterance, whether the form of an accent determines the type of information it conveys is more controversial. We used an eye‐tracking paradigm to investigate whether H*, which has been argued to signal new information, evokes different eye fixations than L+H*, which has been argued to signal the presence of contrast. Our results demonstrate that although listeners interpret (...) these accents differently, their interpretive domains overlap. L+H* creates a strong bias toward contrast referents whereas H* is compatible with both new and contrast referents. (shrink)

In typical statistical learning studies, researchers define sequences in terms of the probability of the next item in the sequence given the current item (or items), and they show that high probability sequences are treated as more familiar than low probability sequences. Existing accounts of these phenomena all assume that participants represent statistical regularities more or less as they are defined by the experimenters—as sequential probabilities of symbols in a string. Here we offer an alternative, or possibly supplementary, hypothesis. Specifically, (...) rather than identifying or labeling individual stimuli discretely in order to predict the next item in a sequence, we need only assume that the participant is able to represent the stimuli as evincing particular similarity relations to one another, with sequences represented as trajectories through this similarity space. We present experiments in which this hypothesis makes sharply different predictions from hypotheses based on the assumption that sequences are learned over discrete, labeled stimuli. We also present a series of simulation models that encode stimuli as positions in a continuous two‐dimensional space, and predict the next location from the current location. Although no model captures all of the data presented here, the results of three critical experiments are more consistent with the view that participants represent trajectories through similarity space rather than sequences of discrete labels under particular conditions. (shrink)

This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid (...) lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language. (shrink)

Recent studies have documented substantial variability among typical listeners in how gradiently they categorize speech sounds, and this variability in categorization gradience may link to how listeners weight different cues in the incoming signal. The present study tested the relationship between categorization gradience and cue weighting across two sets of English contrasts, each varying orthogonally in two acoustic dimensions. Participants performed a four‐alternative forced‐choice identification task in a visual world paradigm while their eye movements were monitored. We found that (a) (...) greater categorization gradience derived from behavioral identification responses corresponds to larger secondary cue weights derived from eye movements; (b) the relationship between categorization gradience and secondary cue weighting is observed across cues and contrasts, suggesting that categorization gradience may be a consistent within‐individual property in speech perception; and (c) listeners who showed greater categorization gradience tend to adopt a buffered processing strategy, especially when cues arrive asynchronously in time. (shrink)

A critical issue in perception is the manner in which top‐down expectancies guide lower level perceptual processes. In speech, a common paradigm is to construct continua ranging between two phonetic endpoints and to determine how higher level lexical context influences the perceived boundary. We applied this approach to music, presenting participants with major/minor triad continua after brief musical contexts. Two experiments yielded results that differed from classic results in speech perception. In speech, context generally expands the category of the expected (...) stimuli. We found the opposite in music: The major/minor boundary shifted toward the expected category, contracting it. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that musical expectancy can feed back to affect lower‐level perceptual processes. However, it may do so in a way that differs fundamentally from what has been seen in other domains. (shrink)

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals’ linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in social network size and shows that individuals with larger social networks are better at understanding the valence of restaurant reviews. Study 2 manipulated social network size by randomly assigning participants (...) to learn novel evaluative words as used by two versus eight speakers. It replicated the finding from Study 1, showing that those exposed to a larger social network were better at comprehending the valence of product reviews containing the novel words that were written by novel speakers. Together, these studies show that the size of one's social network can influence success at language comprehension. They thus open the door to research on how individuals’ lifestyle and the nature of their social interactions can influence linguistic skills. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Evidence from aphasia is considered that leads to a distinction between abstract and concrete thought processes and hence for a distinction between rules and similarity. It is argued that perceptual classification is inherently a rule-following procedure and these rules are unable to be followed when a patient has difficulty with name comprehension and retrieval.

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real‐world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real‐world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states (...) of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality. (shrink)