Individual Differences in Political Ideology and Disgust Sensitivity Affect Real-Time Spoken Language Comprehension

Individuals' moral views have been shown to affect their event-related potentials (ERP) response to spoken statements, and people's political ideology has been shown to guide their sentence completion behavior. Using pupillometry, we asked whether political ideology and disgust sensitivity affect online spoken language comprehension. 60 native speakers of English listened to spoken utterances while their pupil size was tracked. Some of those utterances contained grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, or socio-cultural violations, statements incongruent with existing gender stereotypes and perceived speaker identity, such as “I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay,” spoken by a male speaker. An individual's disgust sensitivity is associated with the Behavioral Immune System, and may be correlated with socio-political attitudes, for example regarding out-group stigmatization. We found that more disgust-sensitive individuals showed greater pupil dilation with semantic anomalies and socio-cultural violations. However, political views differently affected the processing of the two types of violations: whereas more conservative listeners showed a greater pupil response to socio-cultural violations, more progressive listeners engaged more with semantic anomalies, but this effect appeared much later in the pupil record.

Voice Transformation Using Two-Level Dynamic Warping and Neural Networks

Voice transformation, for example, from a male speaker to a female speaker, is achieved here using a two-level dynamic warping algorithm in conjunction with an artificial neural network. An outer warping process which temporally aligns blocks of speech (dynamic time warp, DTW) invokes an inner warping process, which spectrally aligns based on magnitude spectra (dynamic frequency warp, DFW). The mapping function produced by inner dynamic frequency warp is used to move spectral information from a source speaker to a target speaker. Artifacts arising from this amplitude spectral mapping are reduced by reconstructing phase information. Information obtained by this process is used to train an artificial neural network to produce spectral warping information based on spectral input data. The performance of the speech mapping compared using Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD) with previous voice transformation research, and it is shown to perform better than other methods, based on their reported MCD scores.

Igbo Speech Surrogacy: Preliminary Findings Based on the Oja Flute

This research report presents analyses of recordings from the Ìgbò culture of southeastern Nigeria of an ọ̀jà flute player, a female speaker, and a male speaker. After a prepared performance, the participants completed two tasks: (1) mapping speech to flute playing and (2) identifying phrases played on the flute. Contour analysis is applied to annotated recordings to study the mapping of speech tone and rhythm from voice to instrument in parallel utterances by the three participants (male, female, and flute). Response time between the flute playing and spoken phrase identification indicates each prompt’s relative clarity. Using a limited but not predetermined inventory of related praise epithets, participants successfully converted speech to music and music to speech. In the conversion of speech to music, we found that declination was not part of the mapping, indicating it is a phonetic artifact of speech and does not carry a functional load. In identifying surrogate phrases played on the flute (music to speech), we found that dialectical variation caused some misidentification because idioms known in one area of the Igbo dialect cluster are not necessarily known throughout the region. However, òòjà speech surrogacy is found throughout the region. Possibilities and predictions for further research are presented.

The Voice Gives It Away

Two experiments examined the impact of voice pitch on gender stereotyping. Participants listened to a text read by a female (Study 1; N = 171) or male (Study 2, N = 151) speaker, whose voice pitch was manipulated to be high or low. They rated the speaker on positive and negative facets of masculinity and femininity, competence, and likability. They also indicated their own gendered self-concept. High pitch was associated with the ascription of more feminine traits and greater likability. The high-pitch female speaker was rated as less competent, and the high-pitch male speaker was perceived as less masculine. Text content and participants’ gendered self-concept did not moderate the pitch effect. The findings underline the importance of voice pitch for impression formation.

‘Grandpa’ or ‘opera’? Production and perception of unstressed /a/ and /əʁ/ in German

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

WELL, WELL, WELL: VARIATION IN DRESS VOWEL REALISATIONS BEFORE LATERAL /L/ IN AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH

The ongoing el-æl merger in Australian English has been informally recognized by Australians especially those who have experience of contact with Victorians. This study aims to investigate the correlation of speakers’ sex and origin with their /el/ production and how speech styles influence their production. Two male speakers of Australian English from Victoria and South Australia were recorded while reading texts, doing interviews, and having casual conversations. The recordings were then transcribed and analyzed by using various software to describe their /el/ productions. The result of this study was both male subjects are able to produce considerable variations in their /el/ productions. The production of the Victorian male speaker confirmed the findings of previous studies while the SA male speaker showed variations of /el/ similar to back vowels. Speech styles do not significantly affect the variations of /el/ production. The ongoing merger of el-æl in Australian English might be spreading from Victoria through diffusion to its neighboring states. However, more studies should be conducted in order to confirm this suspicion. Other suggestions include customized reading passages and better semi-structured interviews.

Skrelin Method for Constructing Formants for Studying Phonetic Characteristics of Vowels

This article presents the results of applying method for obtaining formant components of vowel phonemes for the corpus of professional reading in Russian. In this paper, a review of existing areas of development of methods for obtaining formant characteristics of vowels for different languages was made. A review was also made of the extent to which formant picture patterns are used in speech technologies and natural language processing. On the corpus of professional reading CORPRES, data was obtained on formant components for 351929 realizations of vowel phonemes on the material of 8 speakers. The data obtained are grouped in accordance with the symbols in the real transcription, which was performed by phoneticians within the framework of segmenting the corpus. The formant planes represent the distribution of allophones of vowels for all speakers according to the two first formants. The variability of formant characteristics in the corpus for pre-tonic and post-tonic allophones are presented for one male speaker. The article also presents the results testifying the difference between the rounded unstressed /i/ and /a/, which are perceived by both naive speakers and expert phoneticians as /u/. As an experimental material, the recordings of reading by one male announcer of specially selected sentences, which took into account various linguistic factors, were used. Analysis of the data of the formant components of these vowels showed that the values of the first formant of these vowels are close to the values of the stressed vowel /u/ for this speaker. The closure of these vowels corresponds to the closure of /u/. The second formant values in the vowels [u], which were to be realized as [i] and [a] are different. They are more advanced in comparison with /u/.

Variation and Culture in Laiholh Psycho-Collocations

As shown in previous research, psycho-collocations are a feature of Laiholh, a Tibeto-Burman language in the Kuki-Chin family, that are used to express emotions or physical feelings through metaphor. Because psycho-collocations use metaphor, they experience metaphor variation and can encode cultural information relevant to the understanding of their meanings. The present paper compares the psycho-collocations reported in a study published in 1998 to the psycho-collocations reported by a 21-year-old male speaker of Laiholh from a diaspora community in Indianapolis to show how much these psycho-collocations vary in use, in meaning, and in construction between speakers; furthermore, to show how the deeper cultural information encoded in certain psycho-collocations acts as context for a more meaningful understanding.

PROSODIC CONVERGENCE AS A RESULT OF SPEAKERS’ INTERACTION IN SPONTANEOUS DIALOGUE

In conversation, speakers become more alike in various dimensions. This phenomenon, commonly called convergence, or entrainment, is widely believed to be crucial to the success and naturalness of human interactions. We investigate three aspects of convergence in prosodic dimensions: automatic entrainment, turn-taking and role relations between speakers. We explore whether speakers coordinate with each other in these dimensions over the conversation globally as well as locally, on a turn-taking basis. The results of the research show that the female speaker had a leading part in the course of the conversation, while the male speaker was a follower. Some prosodic characteristics, such as pitch and syllable duration at the end of the turn, show either individuals' identity in contrast to that of another individual or similar strategies of accommodation. Conversely, the male speaker applied more convergence strategies in the terminal part of the conversation within such prosodic features as mean intensity and duration of pauses marking the transition to a new speaker.