Factors affecting the detection of mispronunciations

R. A. Cole, and J. A. Jakimik

Citation: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 60, S27 (1976); doi: 10.1121/1.2003252
View online: https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2003252
View Table of Contents: https://asa.scitation.org/toc/jas/60/S1
Published by the Acoustical Society of America

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S27 92nd Meeting' Acoustical Society of America
initial stop, liquid or aspirate induces no appreciable length-
ening, other segments in the syllable being sharply reduced;
and initial/s/lengthens the syllable breath group by an
amount approaching the duration of the fricative segment, the
durations of the other acoustic segments being slightly re-
duced. It is hoped that these results will contribute to more
adequatesynthesisby rule. [Work supportedby NIH and VAo]
*Also Department of Linguistics, University of
Connecticut.
2:30
M4. Use of nonsense-syllablemimicry in the s•udyof prosodic
phenomena. Mark Y. Liberman and Lynn A. Streeter (Bell
Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974)
The technique of nonsense-syllable mimicry of natural
utterances [used by Lindbloom and Rapp, Publ. No. 21, Insti-
tute of Linguistics, University of Stockholm (1973) (un-
published)] has many advantages in the study of prosodic
phenomena, especially duration. In analytic studies, the elim-
ination of segmental effects as a factor makes data collection
much more efficient, and requires only one segmentation
criterion. In perceptual studies, the technique eliminates
lexical information without unnatural distortions of the signal.
In a series of validation experiments, we have fouad that:
(a) the patterns of duration obtained by using this technique
were stable and reproducible within and across speakers;
(b) mimicry of different natural models with identical stress
patterns and constituent structures produced indistinguishable
nonsense-syllable duration patterns; (c) obtained duration
patterns correspond closely to results of work on natural
speech by ourselves and others.
2:40
M5. Syntacticboundariesin the timing of trochaic speech.
William E. Cooper, Steven G. Lapointe, and Jeanne M.
Paccia (Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139)
The duration of a stressed syllable is shortened when it is
immediately followed by an unstressed syllable. Previous work
showed that this effect operates across word boundaries but
is diminished in magnitude by the presence of an intervening
syntactic boundary. In this study, the durations of key seg-
ments within stressed syllables were measured in sentence
pairs containing a matched phonetic environment. The results
for ten speakers showed that the shortening effect was blocked
in the presence of a number of major syntactic boundaries,
including the boundaries between a noun phrase (NP) and a
prepositional phrase (PP), between two PP's, and between
a NP or PP and a separate clause. Lesser syntactic boundaries,
including the boundaries between a verb and NP direct object
and between an NP direct object and NP indirect object, did
not block the shortening rule. The magnitude of the blocking
effect did not depend on the transformational history or
internal structure of the syntactic constituents as much as on
the boundary type.
2.50
M6. Syntacticdeterminants of word duration in speech.
Richard Goldhor (Research Laboratory of Electronics, 36-575,
MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139)
A preliminary identification of the primary syntactic deter-
minants of duration in English declarative sentences has been
made. A hundred declarative sentences were generated from
a small set of words, and the durational variations of those
words which appeared in more than six sentences were studied.
The three syntactic determinants which were found to most
strongly and consistently affect word duration are: (1) the
length of the phrase in which a word appears; (2) the position
of the phrase in its dominating clause; and (3) the number and
type of clauses in the sentence. Additionally, these determinants
were found to affect phrase-final wo•ds differently than
phrase-nonfinal words. These findings have been incorporated
into a simple prosodie durational algorithm suitable for use in
a text-to-speech system.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 60, Suppl. No. 1, Fall 1976
S27
3:00
M7. Reading speed as a clue to text structure. M.O. Harris
(Acoustics Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray
Hill, NJ 07974)
Text consists of structured content. Do readers reflect that
structure in their production? A system is under design to
map the content pattern of a given text, sentence by sentence,
thus locating major and lesser topic boundaries. The system
depends on word frequency and distribution in that text, and
on the recognition of synonyms and other forms of reference,
which establish links betwen text segments. Acoustic tools
help to identify significant variations in reading performance,
and these can then be interpreted in terms of the text structure.
Material for the present paper consi•sts primarily of four
passages, each read by three speakers' about an hours' read-
ing in all. The passages are structurally independent excerpts
from much larger works. All of the sentences were random-
ized together and read as one list, and then each passage was
read in original form. A study based on duration measure-
ments, indicates clear agreement among speakers as to the
locations where reading speed changes occur: e.g., in sen-
tences of transition between major topics, and at points of
salient semantic shift. However, the nature of the change-
increase or decrease in speed is highly speaker dependent.
3:10
MS. Perceptual phonetics of coarticulation. J.G. Martin,
R.H. Meltzer, and C.B. Mills (Department of Psychology,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742)
In experiments reported earlier at ASA meetings (November,
1975) and elsewhere, reaction time (RT) of subjects monitoring
stop-consonant phoneme targets in tape-recorded sentences
was observed. RT was compared when the target (a) was
carried by the normal, intact sentence version or 00)was
temporally displaced by experimental intervention, that is,
separated from prior sen{ence context by addition of 200
msec to the normal pre-stop-consonant silent interval. Faster
RT to temporally displaced than to normal targets was inter-
preted in terms of coarticulatory cues to target existing in the
speech interval preceding the intervention which were used to
anticipate the target across the intervention interval. In fur-
ther analysis, data were separated on the basis of four classes
of pretarget phonetic context' stop, fricative, sonorant, and
vowel. All classes produced coarticulatory effects (relatively
faster RT to displaced compared td normal targets), some
more than others. Additional analysis indicated similar ef-
fects in the normal sentence versions also. Discussion con-
cerns the mapping of perceptual results onto acoustic and
articulatory data. [Work supportedby NIMH, ARIBSS.]
ß
3:20
M9. Factors affecting the detection of mispronunciations.
R.A. Cole and J. A. Jakimik (Department of Psychology,
Carnegie--Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213)
In a series of experiments, subjects were presented with
sentences or short stories, and required to press a response
key whenever they detected a mispronounced word. Mispro-
nunelations were produced by changing one phonetic segment
in a word to produce a nonword. Detection of mispronuncia-
tions was effected by factors at several linguistic levels: (a)
the type of phonetic change, (b) the position of the changed
segmentin the word, (c) the stress of the syllable (e. g., "con-
tain" versus "contour", where/k/ was pronounced/g/ in each
word), (d) the syntactic structure of the sentence, and (e)
whether the word containing the mispronunciation occurred
in a previous sentence. The restfits will be summarized and
discussed.
3:30
M10. Word-letter phenomenon with speechstimuli: a word-
segmenteffect. JosephRogers (Departmentof Psychology,
University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093)