Wait for it! Stronger influence of context on categorical perception in Danish than Norwegian

TY - CONF

T1 - Wait for it! Stronger influence of context on categorical perception in Danish than Norwegian

AU - Ishkhanyan, Byurakn

AU - Højen, Anders

AU - Fusaroli, Riccardo

AU - Johansson, Christer

AU - Tylén, Kristian

AU - Christiansen, Morten H.

N1 - Conference code: 41

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - Speech input is often noisy and ambiguous. Yet listenersusually do not have difficulties understanding it. A keyhypothesis is that in speech processing acoustic-phonetic bottom-up processing is complemented by top-down contextual information. This context effect is larger when the ambiguous word is only separated from a disambiguating word by a few syllables compared to many syllables, suggesting that there is a limited time window for processing acoustic-phonetic information with the help of context. Here, we argue that the relative weight of bottom-up and top-down processes may be different for languages that have different phonological properties. We report an experiment comparing two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We show that Danish speakers do indeed rely on context more than Norwegian speakers do. These results highlight the importance of investigating cross-linguistic differences in speech processing, suggesting that speakers of different languages may develop different language processing strategies.

AB - Speech input is often noisy and ambiguous. Yet listenersusually do not have difficulties understanding it. A keyhypothesis is that in speech processing acoustic-phonetic bottom-up processing is complemented by top-down contextual information. This context effect is larger when the ambiguous word is only separated from a disambiguating word by a few syllables compared to many syllables, suggesting that there is a limited time window for processing acoustic-phonetic information with the help of context. Here, we argue that the relative weight of bottom-up and top-down processes may be different for languages that have different phonological properties. We report an experiment comparing two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We show that Danish speakers do indeed rely on context more than Norwegian speakers do. These results highlight the importance of investigating cross-linguistic differences in speech processing, suggesting that speakers of different languages may develop different language processing strategies.

M3 - Paper

T2 - The 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Y2 - 24 July 2019 through 27 July 2019

ER -