Speech Communication in a Global Context


For a wide range of social, political and economic reasons, many (perhaps even most) conversations across the globe today are between interlocutors who do not share a “mother tongue.”  Since speech learning involves a process of tuning to the sound structure of the language(s) we are exposed to in infancy, speakers and hearers with different native language backgrounds approach each other with non-optimally aligned speech perception and production systems.  Our current work is focused on understanding the origins, nature and consequences of this misalignment as a source of  speech intelligibility disruption on one hand, and as a source of cognitive-linguistic flexibility and creativity on the other hand. 

 

Our current work in this area addresses questions such as:

  • How does native language background shape perception of both speech and non-speech sounds?
  • How does overall speech intelligibility vary as a function of listener and talker native language matches and mismatches (e.g. do native speakers of Chinese find Chinese-accented English more intelligible than unaccented English?)
  • Can English listeners adapt to foreign-accented speech (e.g. does prior exposure to Chinese-accented English result in better perception of the speech of a novel Chinese-accented speaker?)
  • What are some of the fine-grained, systematic acoustic-phonetic features of foreign-accented English (e.g. what are some of the temporal features of Chinese-accented English?)
  • Can non-native speech perception be enhanced by laboratory-based training procedures or through the use of clear speech?

 

The Wildcat Corpus of Native and Foreign-Accented English

Bradlow, A. R., Baker, R. E, Choi, A., Kim, M., and Van Engen, K. J.  (2007) The Wildcat Corpus of Native- and Foreign-Accented English.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  121(5), Pt. 2, 3072.

A major focus of our current work in this area in on the development of a large database of digital speech recordings from native and non-native talkers of English.  A key feature of this database is that the talkers are recorded in pairs (all possible pairing of native and non-native English speakers) as they work together on an interactive goal oriented task.  The long-term vision for this project is to compile a substantial database of both scripted and unscripted speech between native and non-native speakers of English that can be used to answer basic phonetic questions about communication between these pairs.  For example, we can use the database to track talker-listener alignment/adaptation over the course of a conversation, to compare phonetic features of speech addressed to native versus to non-native speakers, and to assess communication "efficiency" when one or both conversation partners are non-native speakers of the target language (e.g. how much longer does it take for a team-based task to reach successful completion when one or both of the team members are non-native speakers?)  Moreover, the database should also lend itself to analysis at all levels of linguistic structure (e.g. at the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels). 

 

Publications

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The effect of linguistic experience on speech and non-speech sound perception

·      Bent, T., Bradlow, A. R., and Wright, B. A  (2006).  The influence of linguistic experience on pitch perception in speech and non-speech sounds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32(1), 97-103.

·      Alexander, J. A., Wong, P. C. M. and Bradlow, A. R.  (2005)  Lexical tone perception by musicians and non-musicians. Proceedings of Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal. 

·         Clopper, C. G. and Bradlow, A. R. (2006) Linguistic experience and perceptual free classification of regional dialects.  10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Paris, France, June, 2006.

 

Intelligibility and Acoustic Characteristics of Foreign-Accented speech

·         Bradlow, A. R. and Bent, T. (In press) Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech.  Cognition..

·         Bent, T. and Bradlow, A. R. (2003).  The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  114 (3), 1600-1610.

 

Non-Native Speech Perception Enhancement

·      Bradlow, A. R. (To appear).  Training non-native language sound patterns: Lessons from training Japanese adults on the English /r/-/l/ contrast.  In Hansen, J. and Zampini, M. (Eds.), State-of-the-Art Issues in Second Language Phonology.

·      Bradlow, A. R., and Bent, T. (2002). The clear speech effect for non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 112(1),272-284 . 

·      Bradlow, A. R. and Pisoni, D. B. (1999). Recognition of spoken words by native and non-native listeners: Talker-, listener- and item-related factors. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106 (4) , 2074-2085. 

·      Bradlow, A. R., Akahane-Yamada, R., Pisoni, D. B. and Tohkura, Y. (1999). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: Long-term retention of learning in perception and production. Perception & Psychophysics, 61 (5), 977-985.

·      Bradlow, A. R., Pisoni, D. B., Yamada, R. A. and Tohkura, Y. (1997). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101 (4), 2299-2310.