Nonlinguistic Pitch and Timing Patterns in Word Segmentation
Tracey Raybourn · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2010
How listeners locate word boundaries in fluent speech is a nontrivial problem.Traditionally, acoustic-phonetic information local to the point of segmentation has been considered most relevant to the question.Relatively little work has investigated acoustic cues distal (non-local) to the segmentation locus.Recently, however, Dilley and McAuley (2008) showed distal prosodic context effects on the perception of proximal (i.e., local) word boundaries using eight-syllable word strings (e.g.channel dizzy foot note book worm).The present work tested a variation of the former study by replacing the initial five syllables with five complex tones, which maintained the pitch and timing structures of original sequences; motivation for this experiment comes from a sizable literature concerned with the perceptual organization of nonlinguistic acoustic signals.It was hypothesized that the (nonlinguistic) acoustic structure of the distal context would influence the rate at which participants reported hearing disyllabic final words.Results generally showed null effects, suggesting that the perceptual system may only utilize distal pitch and timing information as it occurs within the structure of speech itself.Contrary to the assumptions of this thesis, the present results may support a view of speech perception in which the auditory system processes speech in a manner distinct from non-speech acoustic signals.iii For my parents who gave me everything