Anne Cutler †

Publications

Displaying 1 - 27 of 27
  • Cutler, A., Andics, A., & Fang, Z. (2011). Inter-dependent categorization of voices and segments. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences [ICPhS 2011] (pp. 552-555). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    Listeners performed speeded two-alternative choice between two unfamiliar and relatively similar voices or between two phonetically close segments, in VC syllables. For each decision type (segment, voice), the non-target dimension (voice, segment) either was constant, or varied across four alternatives. Responses were always slower when a non-target dimension varied than when it did not, but the effect of phonetic variation on voice identity decision was stronger than that of voice variation on phonetic identity decision. Cues to voice and segment identity in speech are processed inter-dependently, but hard categorization decisions about voices draw on, and are hence sensitive to, segmental information.
  • Tuinman, A., & Cutler, A. (2011). L1 knowledge and the perception of casual speech processes in L2. In M. Wrembel, M. Kul, & K. Dziubalska-Kolaczyk (Eds.), Achievements and perspectives in SLA of speech: New Sounds 2010. Volume I (pp. 289-301). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

    Abstract

    Every language manifests casual speech processes, and hence every second language too. This study examined how listeners deal with second-language casual speech processes, as a function of the processes in their native language. We compared a match case, where a second-language process t/-reduction) is also operative in native speech, with a mismatch case, where a second-language process (/r/-insertion) is absent from native speech. In each case native and non-native listeners judged stimuli in which a given phoneme (in sentence context) varied along a continuum from absent to present. Second-language listeners in general mimicked native performance in the match case, but deviated significantly from native performance in the mismatch case. Together these results make it clear that the mapping from first to second language is as important in the interpretation of casual speech processes as in other dimensions of speech perception. Unfamiliar casual speech processes are difficult to adapt to in a second language. Casual speech processes that are already familiar from native speech, however, are easy to adapt to; indeed, our results even suggest that it is possible for subtle difference in their occurrence patterns across the two languages to be detected,and to be accommodated to in second-language listening
  • Tuinman, A., Mitterer, H., & Cutler, A. (2011). The efficiency of cross-dialectal word recognition. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 153-156).

    Abstract

    Dialects of the same language can differ in the casual speech processes they allow; e.g., British English allows the insertion of [r] at word boundaries in sequences such as saw ice, while American English does not. In two speeded word recognition experiments, American listeners heard such British English sequences; in contrast to non-native listeners, they accurately perceived intended vowel-initial words even with intrusive [r]. Thus despite input mismatches, cross-dialectal word recognition benefits from the full power of native-language processing.
  • Wagner, M., Tran, D., Togneri, R., Rose, P., Powers, D., Onslow, M., Loakes, D., Lewis, T., Kuratate, T., Kinoshita, Y., Kemp, N., Ishihara, S., Ingram, J., Hajek, J., Grayden, D., Göcke, R., Fletcher, J., Estival, D., Epps, J., Dale, R. and 11 moreWagner, M., Tran, D., Togneri, R., Rose, P., Powers, D., Onslow, M., Loakes, D., Lewis, T., Kuratate, T., Kinoshita, Y., Kemp, N., Ishihara, S., Ingram, J., Hajek, J., Grayden, D., Göcke, R., Fletcher, J., Estival, D., Epps, J., Dale, R., Cutler, A., Cox, F., Chetty, G., Cassidy, S., Butcher, A., Burnham, D., Bird, S., Best, C., Bennamoun, M., Arciuli, J., & Ambikairajah, E. (2011). The Big Australian Speech Corpus (The Big ASC). In M. Tabain, J. Fletcher, D. Grayden, J. Hajek, & A. Butcher (Eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 166-170). Melbourne: ASSTA.
  • Burnham, D., Ambikairajah, E., Arciuli, J., Bennamoun, M., Best, C. T., Bird, S., Butcher, A. R., Cassidy, S., Chetty, G., Cox, F. M., Cutler, A., Dale, R., Epps, J. R., Fletcher, J. M., Goecke, R., Grayden, D. B., Hajek, J. T., Ingram, J. C., Ishihara, S., Kemp, N. and 10 moreBurnham, D., Ambikairajah, E., Arciuli, J., Bennamoun, M., Best, C. T., Bird, S., Butcher, A. R., Cassidy, S., Chetty, G., Cox, F. M., Cutler, A., Dale, R., Epps, J. R., Fletcher, J. M., Goecke, R., Grayden, D. B., Hajek, J. T., Ingram, J. C., Ishihara, S., Kemp, N., Kinoshita, Y., Kuratate, T., Lewis, T. W., Loakes, D. E., Onslow, M., Powers, D. M., Rose, P., Togneri, R., Tran, D., & Wagner, M. (2009). A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus. In M. Haugh, K. Burridge, J. Mulder, & P. Peters (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2008 HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus (pp. 96-107). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

    Abstract

    Large auditory-visual (AV) speech corpora are the grist of modern research in speech science, but no such corpus exists for Australian English. This is unfortunate, for speech science is the brains behind speech technology and applications such as text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker recognition and forensic identification, talking heads, and hearing prostheses. Advances in these research areas in Australia require a large corpus of Australian English. Here the authors describe a blueprint for building the Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC), a corpus of over 1,100 speakers from urban and rural Australia, including speakers of non-indigenous, indigenous, ethnocultural, and disordered forms of Australian English, each of whom would be sampled on three occasions in a range of speech tasks designed by the researchers who would be using the corpus.
  • Cutler, A., Davis, C., & Kim, J. (2009). Non-automaticity of use of orthographic knowledge in phoneme evaluation. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 380-383). Causal Productions Pty Ltd.

    Abstract

    Two phoneme goodness rating experiments addressed the role of orthographic knowledge in the evaluation of speech sounds. Ratings for the best tokens of /s/ were higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words where /s/ was spelled with C (e.g., voice). This difference did not appear for analogous nonwords for which every lexical neighbour had either S or C spelling (pless, floice). Models of phonemic processing incorporating obligatory influence of lexical information in phonemic processing cannot explain this dissociation; the data are consistent with models in which phonemic decisions are not subject to necessary top-down lexical influence.
  • Cutler, A. (2009). Psycholinguistics in our time. In P. Rabbitt (Ed.), Inside psychology: A science over 50 years (pp. 91-101). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Blumstein, S., & Cutler, A. (2003). Speech perception: Phonetic aspects. In W. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of linguistics (pp. 151-154). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (2003). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. In J. Field (Ed.), Psycholinguistics: A resource book for students. (pp. 185-189). London: Routledge.
  • Cutler, A., Murty, L., & Otake, T. (2003). Rhythmic similarity effects in non-native listening? In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (PCPhS 2003) (pp. 329-332). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. This language-specificity affects listening to non- native speech, if native procedures are applied even though inefficient for the non-native language. However, speakers of two languages with similar rhythmic interpretation should segment their own and the other language similarly. This was observed to date only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report experiments in which Japanese listeners heard Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese, and Telugu listeners heard Japanese. In both cases detection of target sequences in speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. These results suggest that Telugu and Japanese listeners use similar procedures in segmenting speech, and support the idea that languages fall into rhythmic classes, with aspects of phonological structure affecting listeners' speech segmentation.
  • Cutler, A. (2003). The perception of speech: Psycholinguistic aspects. In W. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopaedia of linguistics (pp. 154-157). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • McQueen, J. M., Dahan, D., & Cutler, A. (2003). Continuity and gradedness in speech processing. In N. O. Schiller, & A. S. Meyer (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production: Differences and similarities (pp. 39-78). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2003). Evidence against "units of perception". In S. Shohov (Ed.), Advances in psychology research (pp. 57-82). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.
  • Shi, R., Werker, J., & Cutler, A. (2003). Function words in early speech perception. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3009-3012).

    Abstract

    Three experiments examined whether infants recognise functors in phrases, and whether their representations of functors are phonetically well specified. Eight- and 13- month-old English infants heard monosyllabic lexical words preceded by real functors (e.g., the, his) versus nonsense functors (e.g., kuh); the latter were minimally modified segmentally (but not prosodically) from real functors. Lexical words were constant across conditions; thus recognition of functors would appear as longer listening time to sequences with real functors. Eightmonth- olds' listening times to sequences with real versus nonsense functors did not significantly differ, suggesting that they did not recognise real functors, or functor representations lacked phonetic specification. However, 13-month-olds listened significantly longer to sequences with real functors. Thus, somewhere between 8 and 13 months of age infants learn familiar functors and represent them with segmental detail. We propose that accumulated frequency of functors in input in general passes a critical threshold during this time.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & McQueen, J. M. (1996). Lexical access in continuous speech: Language-specific realisations of a universal model. In T. Otake, & A. Cutler (Eds.), Phonological structure and language processing: Cross-linguistic studies (pp. 227-242). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1996). Phonological structure and its role in language processing. In T. Otake, & A. Cutler (Eds.), Phonological structure and language processing: Cross-linguistic studies (pp. 1-12). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A. (1996). Prosody and the word boundary problem. In J. L. Morgan, & K. Demuth (Eds.), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition (pp. 87-99). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A. (1996). The comparative study of spoken-language processing. In H. T. Bunnell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 1). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    Abstract

    Psycholinguists are saddled with a paradox. Their aim is to construct a model of human language processing, which will hold equally well for the processing of any language, but this aim cannot be achieved just by doing experiments in any language. They have to compare processing of many languages, and actively search for effects which are specific to a single language, even though a model which is itself specific to a single language is really the last thing they want.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1996). The processing of word prosody in Japanese. In P. McCormack, & A. Russell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 599-604). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.
  • Kuijpers, C., Van Donselaar, W., & Cutler, A. (1996). Phonological variation: Epenthesis and deletion of schwa in Dutch. In H. T. Bunnell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 94-97). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    Abstract

    Two types of phonological variation in Dutch, resulting from optional rules, are schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion. In a lexical decision experiment it was investigated whether the phonological variants were processed similarly to the standard forms. It was found that the two types of variation patterned differently. Words with schwa epenthesis were processed faster and more accurately than the standard forms, whereas words with schwa deletion led to less fast and less accurate responses. The results are discussed in relation to the role of consonant-vowel alternations in speech processing and the perceptual integrity of onset clusters.
  • Van Donselaar, W., Kuijpers, C., & Cutler, A. (1996). How do Dutch listeners process words with epenthetic schwa? In H. T. Bunnell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 149-152). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    Abstract

    Dutch words with certain final consonant clusters are subject to optional schwa epenthesis. The present research aimed at investigating how Dutch listeners deal with this type of phonological variation. By means of syllable monitoring experiments, it was investigated whether Dutch listeners process words with epenthetic schwa (e.g., ’balluk’) as bisyllabic words or rather as monosyllabic words. Real words (e.g., ’balk’, ’balluk’) and pseudowords (e.g., ’golk’, ’golluk’) were compared, to examine effects of lexical representation. No difference was found between monitoring times for BAL targets in ’balluk’ carriers as compared to ’balk’ carriers. This suggests that words with epenthetic schwa are not processed as bisyllabic words. The effects for the pseudo-words paralleled those for the real words, which suggests that they are not due to lexical representation but rather to the application of phonological rules.
  • Cutler, A. (1989). Auditory lexical access: Where do we start? In W. Marslen-Wilson (Ed.), Lexical representation and process (pp. 342-356). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Abstract

    The lexicon, considered as a component of the process of recognizing speech, is a device that accepts a sound image as input and outputs meaning. Lexical access is the process of formulating an appropriate input and mapping it onto an entry in the lexicon's store of sound images matched with their meanings. This chapter addresses the problems of auditory lexical access from continuous speech. The central argument to be proposed is that utterance prosody plays a crucial role in the access process. Continuous listening faces problems that are not present in visual recognition (reading) or in noncontinuous recognition (understanding isolated words). Aspects of utterance prosody offer a solution to these particular problems.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1989). Natural speech cues to word segmentation under difficult listening conditions. In J. Tubach, & J. Mariani (Eds.), Proceedings of Eurospeech 89: European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology: Vol. 2 (pp. 372-375). Edinburgh: CEP Consultants.

    Abstract

    One of a listener's major tasks in understanding continuous speech is segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately speaking more clearly. In three experiments, we examined how word boundaries are produced in deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to mark word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggests they are sensitive to listener needs. Application of heuristic segmentation strategies makes word boundaries before strong syllables easiest for listeners to perceive; but under difficult listening conditions speakers pay more attention to marking word boundaries before weak syllables, i.e. they mark those boundaries which are otherwise particularly hard to perceive.
  • Patterson, R. D., & Cutler, A. (1989). Auditory preprocessing and recognition of speech. In A. Baddeley, & N. Bernsen (Eds.), Research directions in cognitive science: A european perspective: Vol. 1. Cognitive psychology (pp. 23-60). London: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A. (1987). Components of prosodic effects in speech recognition. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 1 (pp. 84-87). Tallinn: Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR, Institute of Language and Literature.

    Abstract

    Previous research has shown that listeners use the prosodic structure of utterances in a predictive fashion in sentence comprehension, to direct attention to accented words. Acoustically identical words spliced into sentence contexts arc responded to differently if the prosodic structure of the context is \ aricd: when the preceding prosody indicates that the word will he accented, responses are faster than when the preceding prosodv is inconsistent with accent occurring on that word. In the present series of experiments speech hybridisation techniques were first used to interchange the timing patterns within pairs of prosodic variants of utterances, independently of the pitch and intensity contours. The time-adjusted utterances could then serve as a basis lor the orthogonal manipulation of the three prosodic dimensions of pilch, intensity and rhythm. The overall pattern of results showed that when listeners use prosody to predict accent location, they do not simply rely on a single prosodic dimension, hut exploit the interaction between pitch, intensity and rhythm.
  • Cutler, A. (1987). Speaking for listening. In A. Allport, D. MacKay, W. Prinz, & E. Scheerer (Eds.), Language perception and production: Relationships between listening, speaking, reading and writing (pp. 23-40). London: Academic Press.

    Abstract

    Speech production is constrained at all levels by the demands of speech perception. The speaker's primary aim is successful communication, and to this end semantic, syntactic and lexical choices are directed by the needs of the listener. Even at the articulatory level, some aspects of production appear to be perceptually constrained, for example the blocking of phonological distortions under certain conditions. An apparent exception to this pattern is word boundary information, which ought to be extremely useful to listeners, but which is not reliably coded in speech. It is argued that the solution to this apparent problem lies in rethinking the concept of the boundary of the lexical access unit. Speech rhythm provides clear information about the location of stressed syllables, and listeners do make use of this information. If stressed syllables can serve as the determinants of word lexical access codes, then once again speakers are providing precisely the necessary form of speech information to facilitate perception.
  • Cutler, A., & Carter, D. (1987). The prosodic structure of initial syllables in English. In J. Laver, & M. Jack (Eds.), Proceedings of the European Conference on Speech Technology: Vol. 1 (pp. 207-210). Edinburgh: IEE.

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