Musicians upweight pitch during prosodic categorization

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, i.e. the weight they assign to different acoustic dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular acoustic dimensions leads that dimension to attract attention. Therefore, Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and non-musicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to non-musicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. In this experiment, listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization only, musicians up-weighted pitch compared to non-musicians. These results suggest that musical training is linked with domain-general enhancements of the salience of pitch cues, and that this increase in pitch salience may lead to to an up-weighting of pitch during some prosodic categorization tasks. These findings also support attentional theories of cue weighting, in which more salient acoustic dimensions are given more importance during speech categorization.

The influence of inter-dialect contact on the Korean three-way laryngeal distinction: An acoustic comparison among Seoul Korean speakers and Gyeongsang speakers with limited and extended residence in Seoul

This exploratory study investigates the acoustic correlates of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop distinction in Gyeongsang long-term (LT) transplants who were born in the Gyeongsang region but moved to Seoul to pursue higher education. Acoustic data were collected from eight LT transplants, five short-term (ST) transplants, and 11 Seoul speakers to examine whether exposure to Seoul Korean (SK) affects Gyeongsang speakers’ cue-weighting in distinguishing stops in production. LT transplants produced stimuli in both Gyeongsang and Seoul dialects. A cue-weighting model based on the acoustic data reveals that voice onset time (VOT) is less important to distinguish lenis from aspirated stops for Seoul speakers and for LT transplants’ SK, as compared to ST transplants and LT transplants’ Gyeongsang Korean (GK). In addition, fundamental frequency (F0) is more important for the lenis–aspirated distinction for Seoul speakers and LT transplants’ SK, as compared to ST and LT transplants’ GK, showing that LT transplants rely less on VOT and more on F0 to distinguish lenis from aspirated stops compared to ST transplants. LT transplants’ SK reveals that they rely more on VOT and less on F0 compared to SK speakers. The cue-weighting model of the LT transplants provide empirical evidence that a series of sound changes in GK is due to inter-dialect contact.

Individual differences in cue-weighting in sentence comprehension: An evaluation using Approximate Bayesian Computation

Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing assume that syntactic dependencies are resolved through a content-addressable search process. An important recent claim is that in certain dependency types, the retrieval cues are weighted such that one cue dominates. This cue-weighting proposal aims to explain the observed average behavior, but here we show that there is systematic individual-level variation in cue weighting. Using the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval model, we estimated individual-level parameters for processing speed and cue weighting using 13 published datasets; hierarchical Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) was used to estimate the parameters. The modeling reveals a nuanced picture of cue weighting: we find support for the idea that some participants weight cues differentially, but not all participants do. Only fast readers tend to have the higher weighting for structural cues, suggesting that reading proficiency might be associated with cue weighting. A broader achievement of the work is to demonstrate how individual differences can be investigated in computational models of sentence processing without compromising the complexity of the model.