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SUMMARY:"Great anchor" or "grey tanker"?  Speaker and listener variability
  in speech segmentation - Laurence White\, Department of Experimental Psyc
 hology\, University of Bristol
DTSTART:20091117T160000Z
DTEND:20091117T173000Z
UID:TALK20825@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:Speech segmentation research considers how listeners identify 
 word boundaries in the ongoing stream of sounds.  Numerous linguistic cues
  to word boundaries have been identified\, e.g. lexical stress\, phonotact
 ic transition probabilities\, coarticulation\, glottalisation\, word-initi
 al lengthening\, and lexical information.  I will begin by outlining a hie
 rarchical framework (Mattys\, White & Melhorn\, 2005) which suggests that 
 listeners integrate potential cues hierarchically\, with descending weight
 s allocated to lexical\, segmental\, and prosodic cues.  Lower-level cues 
 drive segmentation when the interpretive conditions are sub-optimal.\n\nI 
 will then present some recent studies examining the impact on segmentation
  of variations in interpretive conditions\, including: (a) the state of li
 nguistic knowledge of the listener\, as seen in L2 speakers\; (b) the natu
 re of the speech input\, in particular the contrast between careful read s
 peech and natural spontaneous speech.  With regard to (a)\, I will discuss
  a study examining how the level of competence of Hungarian L2 speakers of
  English impacts on their use of lexical knowledge and lexical stress as w
 ord boundary cues.  With regard to (b)\, I will describe the ongoing devel
 opment of a corpus of segmentation-oriented spontaneous speech and present
  some preliminary data on contrasts between read and spontaneous speech in
  terms of the availability of potential segmentation cues.  Taken together
 \, such studies converge towards integration of speaker and listerner vari
 ability within models of speech recognition.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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