TY - THES A1 - Huttenlauch, Clara T1 - Individual variability in production and comprehension of prosodically disambiguated structural ambiguities T1 - Individuelle Variabilität in Produktion und Verständnis prosodisch disambiguierter struktureller Ambiguitäten N2 - Strings of words can correspond to more than one interpretation or underlying structure, which makes them ambiguous. Prosody can be used to resolve this structural ambiguity. This dissertation investigates the use of prosodic cues in the domains of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration to disambiguate between two interpretations of ambiguous structures when speakers addressed different interlocutors. The dissertation comprises of three production studies and one comprehension study. Prosodic disambiguation was studied with a focus on German name sequences of three names (coordinates) in two conditions: without (Name1 and Name2 and Name3) and with internal grouping of the first two names ([Name1 and Name2] and Name3). The study of coordinates was complemented with production data of locally ambiguous sentences with a case-ambiguous first noun phrase. Variability was studied in a controlled setting: Productions were elicited with a within-subject manipulation of context in a referential communication task in order to evoke prosodic adaptations to different conversational contexts. Context had five levels and involved interlocutors in three age groups (child, young adult, elderly adult) with German as L1 in the absence of background white noise, the young adult with background white noise, and a young adult without German as L1. Variability was explored at different levels: within a group of young individuals (intra-group level), within and between young individuals (intra-individual level and inter-individual level, respectively), and comparing between the group of young and a group of older speakers (inter-group level). Our data replicate the use of the three prosodic cues (f0-movement, final lengthening, and pause) in productions of young adult speakers and extend their use to productions of older adult speakers. Both age groups distinguished consistently between the two coordinate conditions. Prosodic grouping in production was evident not only on the group-final Name2 but also at earlier stages in the utterance, on the group-internal Name1 (early cues). For some speakers, some listeners were able to decode these early cues effectively as they were able to reliably predict the upcoming structure after listening to Name1 only. Thus, prosodic grouping appears as a globally marked phenomenon building up along the utterance. The internal structure of coordinates was disambiguated irrespective of the conversational context. In our data, speakers only slightly modified the prosodic cues marking the disambiguation in the different contexts. Listeners were unable to identify to which interlocutor the sequence had been produced. We interpret this intra-individual consistency in the production of disambiguating prosodic cues as support for a strong link between prosody and syntax. The findings support models in favour of situational independence of disambiguating prosody. All speakers reliably marked the distinction between the grouping conditions with at least one of the three prosodic cues investigated and most of the speakers used at least two of these cues. Further, individual differences in prosodic grouping did not lead to difficulties in recovering the grouping in comprehension. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a phonological category of prosodic grouping. N2 - Wortfolgen können mehr als einer Interpretation oder einer zugrunde liegenden Struktur entsprechen, was sie mehrdeutig macht. Prosodie kann verwendet werden, um diese strukturelle Mehrdeutigkeit aufzulösen. Diese Dissertation untersucht die Verwendung prosodischer Hinweise in den Bereichen Grundfrequenz (f0) und Dauer zur Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Interpretationen mehrdeutiger Strukturen durch Sprecher:innen, die verschiedene Gesprächspartnerinnen ansprechen. Die Dissertation besteht aus drei Produktionsstudien und einer Verständnisstudie. Prosodische Disambiguierung wurde mit dem Fokus auf deutsche Namenssequenzen aus drei Namen (coordinates – koordinierte Strukturen) in zwei Bedingungen untersucht: ohne (Name1 und Name2 und Name3) und mit interner Gruppierung der ersten beiden Namen ([Name1 und Name2] und Name3). Die Untersuchung der koordinierten Strukturen wurde durch Produktionsdaten mit lokal mehrdeutigen Sätzen mit einer kasus-ambigen ersten Nominalphrase ergänzt. Variabilität wurde in einer kontrollierten Umgebung untersucht: In einer referentiellen Kommunikationsaufgabe wurden Produktionen mit einer Kontextmanipulation innerhalb der Versuchspersonen erhoben, um prosodische Anpassungen an unterschiedliche Gesprächskontexte hervorzurufen. Kontext hatte fünf Ebenen und umfasste Gesprächspartnerinnen in drei Altersgruppen (Kind, junge Erwachsene, ältere Erwachsene) mit Deutsch als L1 in Abwesenheit von weißem Hintergrundrauschen, die junge Erwachsene mit weißem Hintergrundrauschen und eine junge Erwachsene ohne Deutsch als L1. Variabilität wurde auf verschiedenen Ebenen untersucht: innerhalb einer Gruppe junger Personen (intra-Gruppen-Ebene), innerhalb und zwischen jungen Personen (intra-individuelle Ebene bzw. inter-individuelle Ebene) und im Vergleich zwischen der Gruppe junger und einer Gruppe älterer Sprecher:innen (inter-Gruppen-Ebene). Unsere Daten replizieren die Verwendung der drei prosodischen Hinweise (f0-Bewegung, finale Längung und Pause) in Produktionen junger Erwachsener und dehnen ihre Verwendung auf Produktionen älterer Erwachsener aus. Beide Altersgruppen unterschieden konsistent zwischen den beiden Bedingungen der koordinierten Strukturen. Prosodische Gruppierung in der Produktion zeigte sich nicht nur beim gruppenfinalen Name2, sondern auch an früheren Stellen der Äußerung, beim gruppeninternen Name1 (frühe Hinweise). Für die Produktionen einiger Sprecher:innen waren einige Hörer:innen in der Lage, diese frühen Hinweise effektiv zu dekodieren, sie konnten die kommende Struktur zuverlässig vorherzusagen, nachdem sie nur Name1 gehört hatten. Die prosodische Gruppierung erscheint also als ein global ausgeprägtes Phänomen, das sich während der Äußerung aufbaut. Die interne Struktur der koordinierten Strukturen wurde unabhängig vom Gesprächskontext disambiguiert. In unseren Daten veränderten die Sprecher:innen die prosodischen Hinweise zur Disambiguierung in den verschiedenen Kontexten nur geringfügig. Unabhängige Hörer:innen waren nicht in der Lage zu erkennen, zu welcher Gesprächspartnerin die Sequenz produziert worden war. Wir interpretieren diese intra-individuelle Konsistenz in der Produktion von disambiguierenden prosodischen Hinweisen als Unterstützung für eine starke Verbindung zwischen Prosodie und Syntax. Die Ergebnisse unterstützen Modelle, die eine situative/kontextuelle Unabhängigkeit der disambiguierenden Prosodie befürworten. Alle Sprecher:innen markierten die Unterscheidung zwischen den Gruppierungsbedingungen zuverlässig mit mindestens einem der drei untersuchten prosodischen Hinweise, und die meisten Sprecher:innen verwendeten mindestens zwei dieser Hinweise. Außerdem führten individuelle Unterschiede in der prosodischen Gruppierung nicht zu Schwierigkeiten bei der Erkennung der Gruppierung beim Verstehen. Zusammengenommen unterstützen diese Ergebnisse die Existenz einer phonologischen Kategorie prosodischer Gruppierung. KW - prosodic disambiguation KW - prosodische Disambiguierung KW - prosodic cues KW - prosodische Hinweise KW - speech production KW - Sprachproduktion KW - comprehension KW - Sprachverständnis KW - coordinate name structures KW - koordinierte Namensstrukturen KW - locally ambiguous sentences KW - lokal ambige Sätze KW - individual variability KW - individuelle Variabilität KW - age effects KW - Alterseffekte KW - varying interlocutors KW - verschiedene Gesprächspartner:innen KW - structural ambiguities KW - strukturelle Ambiguitäten KW - F0 KW - F0 KW - final lengthening KW - finale Längung KW - duration KW - Dauer KW - gating paradigm KW - Gating Paradigma KW - pause KW - Pause KW - german KW - Deutsch Y1 - 2023 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-619262 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ghaffarvand-Mokari, Payam A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Williams, Daniel T1 - Perceptuomotor compatibility effects in vowels BT - beyond phonemic identity JF - Attention, perception, & psychophysics N2 - Perceptuomotor compatibility between phonemically identical spoken and perceived syllables has been found to speed up response times (RTs) in speech production tasks. However, research on compatibility effects between perceived and produced stimuli at the subphonemic level is limited. Using a cue-distractor task, we investigated the effects of phonemic and subphonemic congruency in pairs of vowels. On each trial, a visual cue prompted individuals to produce a response vowel, and after the visual cue appeared a distractor vowel was auditorily presented while speakers were planning to produce the response vowel. The results revealed effects on RTs due to phonemic congruency (same vs. different vowels) between the response and distractor vowels, which resemble effects previously seen for consonants. Beyond phonemic congruency, we assessed how RTs are modulated as a function of the degree of subphonemic similarity between the response and distractor vowels. Higher similarity between the response and distractor in terms of phonological distance-defined by number of mismatching phonological features-resulted in faster RTs. However, the exact patterns of RTs varied across response-distractor vowel pairs. We discuss how different assumptions about phonological feature representations may account for the different patterns observed in RTs across response-distractor pairs. Our findings on the effects of perceived stimuli on produced speech at a more detailed level of representation than phonemic identity necessitate a more direct and specific formulation of the perception-production link. Additionally, these results extend previously reported perceptuomotor interactions mainly involving consonants to vowels. KW - speech perception KW - speech production KW - psycholinguistics Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02014-1 SN - 1943-3921 SN - 1943-393X VL - 82 IS - 5 SP - 2751 EP - 2764 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Lieshout, Pascal H. H. M. van T1 - Models and theories of speech production BT - editorial JF - Frontiers in psychology KW - speech production KW - motor control KW - dynamical models KW - phonology KW - speech KW - disorders KW - timing Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01238 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 11 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - GEN A1 - Hullebus, Marc Antony A1 - Tobin, Stephen J. A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Speaker-specific structure in German voiceless stop voice onset times T2 - 19th Annual confernce of the international speech communication association (INTERSPEECH 2018), VOLS 1-6: speech research for emerging markets in multilingual societies N2 - Voice onset time (VOT), a primary cue for voicing in many languages including English and German, is known to vary greatly between speakers, but also displays robust within-speaker consistencies, at least in English. The current analysis extends these findings to German. VOT measures were investigated from voiceless alveolar and velar stops in CV syllables cued by a visual prompt in a cue-distractor task. Comparably to English, a considerable portion of German VOT variability can be attributed to the syllable’s vowel length and the stop’s place of articulation. Individual differences in VOT still remain irrespective of speech rate. However, significant correlations across places of articulation and between speaker-specific mean VOTs and standard deviations indicate that talkers employ a relatively unified VOT profile across places of articulation. This could allow listeners to more efficiently adapt to speaker-specific realisations. KW - speech production KW - speech variability KW - voice onset time Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5108-7221-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2288 SN - 2308-457X SP - 1403 EP - 1407 PB - ISCA-International Speech Communication Association CY - Baixas ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fargier, Raphael A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris A1 - Pinet, Svetlana A1 - Alario, F. -Xavier A1 - Laganaro, Marina T1 - Word onset phonetic properties and motor artifacts in speech production EEG recordings JF - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research N2 - Electrophysiological research using verbal response paradigms faces the problem of muscle artifacts that occur during speech production or in the period preceding articulation. In this context, this paper has two related aims. The first is to show how the nature of the first phoneme influences the alignment of the ERPs. The second is to further characterize the EEG signal around the onset of articulation, both in temporal and frequency domains. Participants were asked to name aloud pictures of common objects. We applied microstate analyses and time-frequency transformations of ERPs locked to vocal onset to compare the EEG signal between voiced and unvoiced labial plosive word onset consonants. We found a delay of about 40 ms in the set of stable topographic patterns for /b/ relative to /p/ onset words. A similar shift was observed in the power increase of gamma oscillations (30-50 Hz), which had an earlier onset for /p/ trials (similar to 150 ms before vocal onset). This 40-ms shift is consistent with the length of the voiced proportion of the acoustic signal prior to the release of the closure in the vocal responses. These results demonstrate that phonetic features are an important parameter affecting response-locked ERPs, and hence that the onset of the acoustic energy may not be an optimal trigger for synchronizing the EEG activity to the response in vocal paradigms. The indexes explored in this study provide a step forward in the characterization of muscle-related artifacts in electrophysiological studies of speech and language production. KW - EEG KW - motor artifact KW - phonetics KW - picture naming KW - speech production Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.12982 SN - 0048-5772 SN - 1469-8986 VL - 55 IS - 2 PB - Wiley CY - Hoboken ER - TY - GEN A1 - Noiray, Aude A1 - Popescu, Anisia A1 - Killmer, Helene A1 - Robertus, Elina A1 - Krüger, Stella A1 - Hintermeier, Lisa T1 - Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children’s production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of age. The technique of ultrasound imaging allowed for comparing the articulatory foundations of children’s coarticulatory patterns. Four behavioral tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness from large to small units and expressive vocabulary were also administered. Generalized additive modeling revealed strong interactions between children’s vocabulary and phonological awareness with coarticulatory patterns. Greater knowledge of sub-lexical units was associated with lower intra-syllabic coarticulation degree and greater differentiation of articulatory gestures for individual segments. This interaction was mostly nonlinear: an increase in children’s phonological proficiency was not systematically associated with an equivalent change in coarticulation degree. Similar findings were drawn between vocabulary and coarticulatory patterns. Overall, results suggest that the process of developing spoken language fluency involves dynamical interactions between cognitive and speech motor domains. Arguments for an integrated-interactive approach to skill development are discussed. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 598 KW - language acquisition KW - coarticulation KW - speech motor control KW - phonological awareness KW - vocabulary KW - speech production Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-444729 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 598 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Noiray, Aude A1 - Popescu, Anisia A1 - Killmer, Helene A1 - Rubertus, Elina A1 - Krüger, Stella A1 - Hintermeier, Lisa T1 - Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration JF - Frontiers in Psychology N2 - The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children’s production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of age. The technique of ultrasound imaging allowed for comparing the articulatory foundations of children’s coarticulatory patterns. Four behavioral tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness from large to small units and expressive vocabulary were also administered. Generalized additive modeling revealed strong interactions between children’s vocabulary and phonological awareness with coarticulatory patterns. Greater knowledge of sub-lexical units was associated with lower intra-syllabic coarticulation degree and greater differentiation of articulatory gestures for individual segments. This interaction was mostly nonlinear: an increase in children’s phonological proficiency was not systematically associated with an equivalent change in coarticulation degree. Similar findings were drawn between vocabulary and coarticulatory patterns. Overall, results suggest that the process of developing spoken language fluency involves dynamical interactions between cognitive and speech motor domains. Arguments for an integrated-interactive approach to skill development are discussed. KW - language acquisition KW - coarticulation KW - speech motor control KW - phonological awareness KW - vocabulary KW - speech production Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02777 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 10 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - GEN A1 - Festman, Julia A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Germans prepare for the English past tense BT - silent production of inflected words during EEG T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Processes involved in late bilinguals' production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants' silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 521 KW - morphologically complex words KW - masked priming experiments KW - brain potentials KW - speech production KW - time-course KW - language production KW - electrophysiological evidence KW - late bilinguals KW - lexical access KW - 2nd-language Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-414455 IS - 521 SP - 487 EP - 506 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Shaw, Jason A. A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Stochastic time models of syllable structure T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Drawing on phonology research within the generative linguistics tradition, stochastic methods, and notions from complex systems, we develop a modelling paradigm linking phonological structure, expressed in terms of syllables, to speech movement data acquired with 3D electromagnetic articulography and X-ray microbeam methods. The essential variable in the models is syllable structure. When mapped to discrete coordination topologies, syllabic organization imposes systematic patterns of variability on the temporal dynamics of speech articulation. We simulated these dynamics under different syllabic parses and evaluated simulations against experimental data from Arabic and English, two languages claimed to parse similar strings of segments into different syllabic structures. Model simulations replicated several key experimental results, including the fallibility of past phonetic heuristics for syllable structure, and exposed the range of conditions under which such heuristics remain valid. More importantly, the modelling approach consistently diagnosed syllable structure proving resilient to multiple sources of variability in experimental data including measurement variability, speaker variability, and contextual variability. Prospects for extensions of our modelling paradigm to acoustic data are also discussed. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 514 KW - speech production KW - temporal organization KW - complex onsets KW - english KW - cues KW - perception KW - syllabication KW - articulation KW - categories KW - phonology Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-409815 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 514 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Festman, Julia A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - How Germans prepare for the English past tense BT - silent production of inflected words during EEG T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Processes involved in late bilinguals' production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants' silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 504 KW - morphologically complex words KW - masked priming experiments KW - brain potentials KW - speech production KW - time-course KW - language production KW - electrophysiological evidence KW - late bilinguals KW - lexical access KW - 2nd-language Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-413678 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 504 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Williams, Daniel A1 - Escudero, Paola T1 - Influences of listeners' native and other dialects on cross-language vowel perception JF - Frontiers in psychology KW - non-native speech perception KW - native dialects KW - non-native dialects KW - speech production KW - acoustic phonetics Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01065 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 5 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER -