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Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
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TY - GEN
T1 - Schwa deletion and perceived tempo in English
AU - Plug, Leendert
AU - Lennon, Robert
AU - Smith, Rachel
PY - 2022/5/23
Y1 - 2022/5/23
N2 - We report on an experiment aimed to test the hypothesis that listeners orient to canonical forms when judging the tempo of reduced speech. Orientation to canonical forms should yield higher tempo estimates than orientation to surface phone strings when canonical phones are deleted. We tested the hypothesis for English, capitalizing on the fact that the non-realization of schwa in an unstressed syllable (e.g. support) may result in a surface phone string associated with a different word than the intended one (sport). We presented listeners with sentences containing ambiguous surface realizations, along with orthographic representations which convinced some that they were listening to disyllabic words (support etc.) and others that they were listening to monosyllabic ones (sport etc.). Asking listeners to judge the tempo of the sentences allowed us to assess whether the difference in imposed lexical interpretation had an impact on perceived tempo. Our results reveal the predicted effect of the imposed interpretation: sentences with a ‘disyllabic’ interpretation for the ambiguous word form were judged faster than (the same) sentences with a ‘monosyllabic’ interpretation.
AB - We report on an experiment aimed to test the hypothesis that listeners orient to canonical forms when judging the tempo of reduced speech. Orientation to canonical forms should yield higher tempo estimates than orientation to surface phone strings when canonical phones are deleted. We tested the hypothesis for English, capitalizing on the fact that the non-realization of schwa in an unstressed syllable (e.g. support) may result in a surface phone string associated with a different word than the intended one (sport). We presented listeners with sentences containing ambiguous surface realizations, along with orthographic representations which convinced some that they were listening to disyllabic words (support etc.) and others that they were listening to monosyllabic ones (sport etc.). Asking listeners to judge the tempo of the sentences allowed us to assess whether the difference in imposed lexical interpretation had an impact on perceived tempo. Our results reveal the predicted effect of the imposed interpretation: sentences with a ‘disyllabic’ interpretation for the ambiguous word form were judged faster than (the same) sentences with a ‘monosyllabic’ interpretation.
U2 - 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-96
DO - 10.21437/speechprosody.2022-96
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
VL - 2022-May
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody
SP - 470
EP - 474
BT - Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022
CY - Lisbon, Portugal
T2 - Speech Prosody 2022
Y2 - 23 May 2022 through 26 May 2022
ER -