Millions of different people talk to each other, and no two people sound exactly the same. Yet, whomever we are listening to, we expect to easily understand what he or she has to say. Somehow, we adjust to each new talker’s voice and hear the “same” speech sounds. Until recently, differences between voices were viewed as a perceptual problem interfering with speech perception. Recent developments, however, have shown that familiar voices can facilitate speech. Speech-perception models can no longer dismiss talkers’ voices merely as carriers for speech, and models currently struggle to understand the relation between vocal identity and the content of speech. The present thesis contributed to this discussion by examining familiar talkers, whose identities have been encoded into listeners’ memories. Chapter 2 studied familiar faces’ and voices’ contribution to audiovisual speech processing, and found that different listeners may focus more strongly on learning either a familiar talker’s face or voice, but will recall what they have learned in response to that talker’s voice, not face. Chapter 3 examined self-speech, and discovered that we do receive a familiar-talker speech-processing advantage from hearing our own recorded voice, but only so far as we can identify self-voice; when voices are obscured by noise, we receive an equivalent advantage for all voices of our own sex. Chapter 4 confirmed a relation between speech familiarity and accurate talker identification. Taken together, the data presented in this thesis support a model of speech perception in which listeners encode talkers’ identities inclusive of both idiosyncratic speech production and vocal qualities and, when processing speech, recall as many of a talker’s identifying characteristics as can be usefully applied to an incoming speech signal. These findings contribute to our understanding of how we utilize talker identity in perceiving speech. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Research paper (M.A.) -- Cardinal Stritch College -- Milwaukee, 1980. / A research paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education (Reading Specialist). Includes bibliographical references (84-87 p.).

The present thesis focuses on how native English listeners process phonological rule misapplications in non-native-accented speech. In Experiment 1, we examined whether listeners use information about a speaker’s native language to help them understand that speaker’s accented English. The test case for this scenario was word-final obstruent devoicing in German and German-accented speech. Results showed that participants did not generalize their knowledge cross-linguistically. In Experiment 2, we used a categorization task and an eye-tracking visual world paradigm to investigate listeners’ use of a position-sensitive allophonic alternation, the velarization of /l/, as a word segmentation cue in native English. Participants were able to use velarization as a cue during word segmentation, even though they also showed a later, post-perceptual bias to segment /l/ as word initial. Follow-up experiments will build upon these conclusions using German-accented speech as stimuli, which will have reduced or absent velarization of /l/ in word-final position. In sum, these experiments inform us about the limits of phonological knowledge about foreign-accented speech.

Bilingualism has been studied extensively in multiple disciplines, yet we are still trying to figure out how exactly bilinguals think. A bilingual advantage has been observed in various experimental studies, but also has not been observed in many other studies. A bilingual advantage has been shown in tasks using selective attention. These tasks study the effects of language interference, where two types of interference are observed: interlingual (between-languages) and intralingual (within one language). This study examined language interference in Spanish-English bilinguals, using an auditory-visual simultaneous translation experimental setup. 16 college English monolinguals and 17 college Spanish-English bilinguals were tested. The task was to ignore the word in the headphones and to translate/repeat the word on the screen into English. Distractor words went to either the right, left, or both headphone ears. Subjects were given 72 words to translate, words were randomized, and ear of the distractor word was randomized. The monolingual group was not affected by any independent variables tested except screen word length. Bilinguals did worse when the word and audio were in Spanish, and when the word and audio were different words. No ear advantage was observed. Proficiency levels and first language had no effects on bilingual performance. More intralingual interference was observed for bilinguals only, no significant interference occurred for monolinguals. A slight bilingual advantage was found but not fully, because of the high load of the task and introduction of another language. In conclusion, bilinguals did not have a cognitive advantage in this experiment setup.

This study is a naturalistic exploration of the way elementary school children resolve anaphoric pronoun reference in their oral reading of complete narratives. The resolution of pronominal reference is of interest because of the possibility it offers to examine how readers construct a meaning for a text while they are reading it. Third-person pronouns offer interesting points to examine how readers deal with the referential structure of text. They play an important role in establishing the structure by virtue of their dependence on other text items for their interpretation. It was assumed that the way readers deal with pronouns would provide insight into the way they were constructing the referential structure of the text. Miscue analysis was selected as an appropriate technique to examine the in-process behavior of readers. The miscues involving third-person pronouns made by 88 readers from second, fourth, and sixth grade children were analyzed. The children at each grade level each read a complete story. A total of 1,037 miscues involving third-person anaphoric pronouns were noted for qualitative analysis. The analysis produced the following results. Miscues involving third-person anaphoric pronouns occurred proportionally less frequently than miscues involving other text items. This suggested that pronouns were more readily comprehended by the subjects of this study than other text items. The frequency of insertion and substitution of particular third-person pronouns was directly proportional to the frequency of the particular pronoun in the text. This suggested that the subjects were sensitive to the broad referential character of the text. Substitution miscues involving third-person anaphoric pronouns were restricted to a small set of grammatical items. This suggested that the subjects were sensitive to syntax as they processed pronouns. A number of atypical miscue patterns were identified at particular points in the texts. These atypical patterns provided the strongest evidence for the view that readers construct a cognitively interpreted text as they read. The correction of pronoun miscues suggested that when the subjects constructed a cognitively interpreted text they did so tentatively and were prepared to change this in the face of disconfirming evidence in the subsequent text.

This study investigates how learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) whose first language (L1) is Swedish select prepositions in the English language. The study involves two groups, the participants and their respective controls. The participants are advanced EFL students at a Swedish university and their controls are intermediate EFL speakers who are no longer enrolled in an EFL course. The aim of the present psycholinguistic investigation is to elucidate the process of the preposition selection in EFL by means of a think-aloud-protocol. The present study involves the assumption that preposition selection by Swedish EFL learners is based on both implicitly and explicitly acquired knowledge. Data analysis indicates that the participants’ EFL preposition selection is influenced by their L1 knowledge. The results suggest that EFL preposition selection does not differ significantly between the two groups. However, the results are indicative of a variation in EFL preposition selection between the two groups in an EFL proficiency test and a think-aloud-protocol.

Speech errors in normal speech provide important information about the processing mechanisms of speaking, one of the most complex cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills that human beings use for communication. Studies of speech errors form a major part of psycholinguistic research on speech production, but until recently such research has been largely based on the evidence from only a few European languages. In contrast to most speech error analyses in English, this dissertation focuses on the discussion of speech errors in Chinese, illustrating that speech errors featuring Chinese language-specific characteristics imply some processing steps that are not observed in previous speech production models. Similarities between speech errors in Chinese and English in terms of their patterns and classification suggest universality in speech production disorders in normal speech, but language-specific characteristics of the two languages suggest that English and Chinese speakers experience different processing steps in speech production, and err at different rates in different domains. For example, tonal errors in Chinese indicate that Chinese speakers undergo a special phonological process sub-step for tonal specification, this sub-step involves tone sandhi rule application, a processing task that does not concern non-tonal language speakers. A second example arises when, in the course of articulating a retrieved lexical item, the logophonographic features of the Chinese writing system provide phonological information about the lexical item through a processing step of "mental visualization". Partial visualization or incorrect phonological processing of the mentally visualized items can lead to errors of the logo-phonographic type which are not found in alphabetic languages such as English. Third, bilingual errors show that mixing of syntactic and phonological features of two different languages can occur when speech is being planned by bilingual speakers. Lastly, socio-cultural values in Chinese, such as those that involve address patterns and kinship term systems, can lead to errors that are rarely experienced by English speakers. Such different types of speech errors found in Chinese provide evidence that speech in Chinese is mediated by certain steps that have not been described in the many speech production models based on evidence derived from English errors. In general agreement with the functional-positional speech production model of Garrett (1975. 1988) and the overall language production schema of Levelt (1989. 1992), this dissertation argues for a unified speech production model that describes each of the ordered steps in the speech production process, including conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. Such a model does not overemphasize either the linguistic or psychological factors that cause speech errors. In order to precisely account for speech errors of all types in all natural languages, this model involves a set of ordered cognitive activities with psychological, linguistic, socio-cultural and contextual factors under full consideration. / Graduate

The re-creation of a holistic narrative that integrates the pre- and post-injury self is integral to recovery following acquired brain injury (ABI). However, individuals may struggle with deficits in linguistic skills required for narrative, along with reduced functioning, feelings of grief, difficulties with cognition, and other communicative challenges. This mixed-methods study analyzed data gathered from six non-aphasic adult participants with ABI during semi-structured interviews and through assessments. Thematic analyses showed that individuals experience a change in their sense of self prevs. post-injury, reflected in their self-narratives, and that even clinically undiagnosed changes in speech, language, and communication are impactful. Results from linguistic analysis and assessments suggest a relationship among a person’s cognitive capacity, his/her sense of loss, and pre- vs. post-injury narrative of self speech rates. Participants spoke comparatively slower about their post-injury self, with those participants with higher feelings of loss showing a reduction in their speech rates comparatively more. / Graduate / 0290 / 0460 / 0382 / bje@uvic.ca

The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children, as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning and generalizing verbs. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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