Issues in Listening

6.1
ISSUES IN LISTENING
At the higher levels of processing
(constructing a meaning representation • there are strong parallels between listening and reading.
and applying background knowledge),

Indeed the same processing route may

be used by the two skills.

But at lower levels, they are not • The reason is that the raw material of listening – connected
comparable. speech - is very different in form from the word on the page.

Here are a few issues which pose

challenges to the listening researcher.

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 The linearity issue
• The spoken signal does not consist of a string of phonemes in the way
that written language consists of a string of letters. Take the word
Ikeet/.
• There is no precise point at which the sound Ikl can be said to end; it
blends into the succeeding lee/, just as the leel blends into It/. We are
not dealing with beads on a necklace, it has been said, but something
more like the result of dropping a box of eggs.
• Question arising: do listeners actually analyze a speech signal into
phonemes?

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The non-invariance issue

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The normalization Issue
Question arising:
how do we manage
to normalize
Every speaker has a distinctive voice (adjust) to the voice
and speech rate
and accent of a
wide range of
individuals?

There are
Our articulators We all speak at
important
(mouths, jaws, different rates; and
Many of us have differences in pitch
tongues, teeth) a speaker's speech
regional accents. between the voices
vary greatly in size, rate may vary on
of men and the
shape and position. different occasions.
voices of women.

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The accommodation issue

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The Lexical Segmentation Issue

There are no consistent gaps

between words in connected speech
as there are in written language.

Question arising: how do we

manage to work out where one
word ends and the next begins?

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The Storage Issue
Readers have a Listening is not recursive
permanent record on in the same way: the
the page ,of the words speech signal is
they have encountered transitory and listeners
Questions arising
and can refer back to are entirely reliant upon
them if they lose the their own mental
thread of the representation of the
argument. utterance so far.

Does listening depend to

in what form do we store some extent upon the
the products of listener's ability to store
listening?-Verbatim text information i.e. upon the
or propositions? extent of their Working
Memory?

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Solutions
Here, we consider some
There has been much interest in this area by researchers in
possible solutions to the
Artificial Intelligence (AI) because the phenomenon has
first four issues - those
been a major obstacle to developing equipment which can
that concern the high
interpret the human voice. Broadly, the solutions fall into
degree of variation in the
two types:
speech signal.

those which focus on how

those which focus on how phonological information
we process the signal. is represented in our
mental store.

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Process solutions

Motor Theory The possibility

An early attempt suggested that was raised that
to deal with the we are able to listening might
There is
non-invariance interpret the be associated
evidence that
problem was sounds we hear with a degree of
limited sub-
proposed ( 1967) in connected subvocalization,
vocalization
by Liberman and speech by with the listener
sometimes
his colleagues at relating them to forming silent
accompanies
the Haskins the muscular articulatory
reading.
Laboratories in movements that settings to match
the USA. we make when the sounds that
producing them. they heard.

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Activity

Do you see
any loopholes
in the theory?

• (a) what we know about phonology in the parallel

Consider: skill of reading;
• (b) the situation of a learner of a second language.

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• A second line of attack was to discuss whether the phoneme is indeed
a unit of perceptual processing.
• There is much evidence from the teaching of reading that preliterate
children find it very difficult to break a spoken word into its
component sounds; there is similar evidence from studies of illiterate
adults.
• Is the concept of a phoneme therefore something that we acquire
only when we learn an alphabet?

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• One theory is that there is no 'phonological' level at all, but that we
use phonetic features such as 'plosive', 'voiced', 'labial' when making
matches with words in our lexicon.
• Other proposals retain the notion that listeners 'package' the speech
signal into units before submitting it to the lexicon - but suggest a unit
larger than the extremely

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Activity

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• A more radical solution to the 'unit of perception' discussion is that we do
not package the signal into linguistic units at all but divide it up into equal
sections determined by time.
• This approach is adopted by the best-known computer simulation of
listening.
• TRACE, a connectionist model, was designed by Elman and McClelland in
1986, and makes a virtue of the fact that listening takes place in real time.
• It processes the signal in small time-slices which are independent of
phoneme, syllable and word boundaries. Each time-slice is connected to
those that immediately precede it, so the processor can combine evidence
from current input with evidence from what has immediately gone before.
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• TRACE's time-slice basis and its interconnections enable it to deal with
the way in which phonemes overlap; and accounts for how we
manage to adjust to differences of speech rate across different
speakers. However, as its critics point out, the solution is bought at
the cost of a cumbersome process in which a massive system of
lexical connections has to be re-engaged after every third time-slice.
• Some limited assistance in identifying phonemes is provided by lip
movements; hence what is known, after one of its discoverers, as the
McGurk effect.

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Activity
• Which phonemes would be more easily identified thanks to the
McGurk effect?

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Storage Solutions

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Storage Solutions

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Activity
Which seems to
you the more
plausible?
one with a single
under-specified
representation for a
phoneme
Consider these two
storage solutions:
one with multiple
traces which produce
a core value.

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Assignment

Write a
note on
issues in
listening.

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 Thank you

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