Lexical segmentation of speech from energy above 5 kHz
A. Davi Vitela, Brian B. Monson, Andrew J. Lotto · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2013
Research in the field of speech perception has traditionally focused on the acoustic information or cues present in the frequency region below 5 kHz, thus ignoring high frequency energy (HFE). A recent series of studies, however, demonstrated that listeners could determine the mode of production (speech or singing) and further, could identify what was being spoken or sung from the HFE alone and with a speech-shaped masking noise in the lower frequencies. This begs the question as to what types of information listeners are extracting to guide their perception. The current study examined the ability of listeners to transcribe short semantically-unpredictable but syntactically-well-formed spoken phrases that were high-pass filtered at 5.6 kHz. Of particular interest was the ability of some listeners to correctly determine the placement of word boundaries even without the availability of low-frequency information. These findings add to a growing literature on the linguistically relevant information present in higher frequency regions. Results will be framed within current theories of acoustic signatures to lexical segmentation. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD.]