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arXiv · 2406.05515

Mmm whatcha say? Uncovering distal and proximal context effects in first and second-language word perception using psychophysical reverse correlation

Paige Tuttösí·H. Henny Yeung·Yue Wang·Fenqi Wang·Guillaume Denis·Jean-Julien Aucouturier·Angelica Lim
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Abstract

Acoustic context effects, where surrounding changes in pitch, rate or timbre influence the perception of a sound, are well documented in speech perception, but how they interact with language background remains unclear. Using a reverse-correlation approach, we systematically varied the pitch and speech rate in phrases around different pairs of vowels for second language (L2) speakers of English (/i/-/I/) and French (/u/-/y/), thus reconstructing, in a data-driven manner, the prosodic profiles that bias their perception. Testing English and French speakers (n=25), we showed that vowel perception is in fact influenced by conflicting effects from the surrounding pitch and speech rate: a congruent proximal effect 0.2s pre-target and a distal contrastive effect up to 1s before; and found that L1 and L2 speakers exhibited strikingly similar prosodic profiles in perception. We provide a novel method to investigate acoustic context effects across stimuli, timescales, and acoustic domain.

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Paige Tuttösí, H. Henny Yeung, Yue Wang, Fenqi Wang, Guillaume Denis, Jean-Julien Aucouturier, Angelica Lim. 2025-07-30. Mmm whatcha say? Uncovering distal and proximal context effects in first and second-language word perception using psychophysical reverse correlation. https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2024-1296

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