科研之友
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摘要
It has long been known that the identification of aural stimuli as speech is context-dependent (Remez et al., 1981). Here, we demonstrate that the discrimination of speech stimuli from their non-speech transforms is further modulated by their linguistic structure. We gauge the effect of phonological structure on discrimination across different manifestations of well-formedness in two distinct languages. One case examines the restrictions on English syllables (e. g., the well-formed melif vs. ill-formed mlif); another investigates the constraints on Hebrew stems by comparing ill-formed AAB stems (e. g., TiTuG) with well-formed ABB and ABC controls (e. g., GiTuT, MiGuS). In both cases, non-speech stimuli that conform to well-formed structures are harder to discriminate from speech than stimuli that conform to ill-formed structures. Auxiliary experiments rule out alternative acoustic explanations for this phenomenon. In English, we show that acoustic manipulations that mimic the mlif-melif contrast do not impair the classification of non-speech stimuli whose structure is well-formed (i.e., disyllables with phonetically short vs. long tonic vowels). Similarly, non-speech stimuli that are ill-formed in Hebrew present no difficulties to English speakers. Thus, non-speech stimuli are harder to classify only when they are well-formed in the participants' native language. We conclude that the classification of non-speech stimuli is modulated by their linguistic structure: inputs that support well-formed outputs are more readily classified as speech.
- 出版日期2011
- 单位东北大学
