Blog Archives

Cue-integration and context effects in speech: Evidence against speaking-rate normalization

Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2012). Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 74, 1284-1301.

Abstract: Listeners are able to accurately recognize speech despite variation in acoustic cues across contexts, such as different speaking rates. Previous work has suggested that listeners use rate information (indicated by vowel length; VL) to modify their use of context-dependent acoustic cues, like voice-onset time (VOT), a primary cue to voicing... Read more →

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Posted in Journal Articles

Continuous perception and graded categorization: Electrophysiological evidence for a linear relationship between the acoustic signal and perceptual encoding of speech

Toscano, J. C., McMurray, B., Dennhardt, J., & Luck, S. J. (2010). Psychological Science, 21, 1532-1540.

Abstract: Speech sounds are highly variable, yet listeners readily extract information from them and transform continuous acoustic signals into meaningful categories during language comprehension. A central question is whether perceptual encoding captures acoustic detail in a one-to-one fashion or whether it is affected by phonological categories... Read more →

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Cue Integration With Categories: Weighting Acoustic Cues in Speech Using Unsupervised Learning and Distributional Statistics

Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2010). Cognitive Science, 34, 434-464.

Abstract: During speech perception, listeners make judgments about the phonological category of sounds by taking advantage of multiple acoustic cues for each phonological contrast. Perceptual experiments have shown that listeners weight these cues differently. How do listeners weight and combine acoustic cues to arrive at an overall estimate of the category for a speech sound?.. Read more →

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Statistical learning of phonetic categories: Insights from a computational approach

McMurray, B., Aslin, R. N., & Toscano, J. C. (2009). Developmental Science, 12, 369-378.

Abstract: Recent evidence (Maye, Werker & Gerken, 2002) suggests that statistical learning may be an important mechanism for the acquisition of phonetic categories in the infant’s native language. We examined the sufficiency of this hypothesis and its implications for development by implementing a statistical learning mechanism in a computational model based on a mixture of Gaussians (MOG) architecture... Read more →

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Acoustic cue integration in natural speech

Empirical and computational results

Toscano, J. C. and McMurray, B. (2006, October). Talk presented at the 12th Midcontinental Workshop on Phonology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.

Abstract:

Multiple acoustic cues in the speech signal often contribute to a single phonetic categorization. For example, in the perception of word-initial voicing in stop consonants, voice onset time (VOT) and vowel length have both been shown to influence voicing judgments (Summerfield, 1981)... Read more →

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Posted in Presentations

A lexical locus for the integration of asynchronous cues to voicing

An investigation with natural stimuli

Toscano, J. C. and McMurray, B. (2006, June). Poster presented at the 151st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Providence, RI.

PDF of poster.. Read more →

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