Anne Cutler †

Publications

Displaying 1 - 47 of 47
  • Asano, Y., Yuan, C., Grohe, A.-K., Weber, A., Antoniou, M., & Cutler, A. (2020). Uptalk interpretation as a function of listening experience. In N. Minematsu, M. Kondo, T. Arai, & R. Hayashi (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020 (pp. 735-739). Tokyo: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-150.

    Abstract

    The term “uptalk” describes utterance-final pitch rises that carry no sentence-structural information. Uptalk is usually dialectal or sociolectal, and Australian English (AusEng) is particularly known for this attribute. We ask here whether experience with an uptalk variety affects listeners’ ability to categorise rising pitch contours on the basis of the timing and height of their onset and offset. Listeners were two groups of English-speakers (AusEng, and American English), and three groups of listeners with L2 English: one group with Mandarin as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, one with German as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, and one with German as L1 but no AusEng experience. They heard nouns (e.g. flower, piano) in the framework “Got a NOUN”, each ending with a pitch rise artificially manipulated on three contrasts: low vs. high rise onset, low vs. high rise offset and early vs. late rise onset. Their task was to categorise the tokens as “question” or “statement”, and we analysed the effect of the pitch contrasts on their judgements. Only the native AusEng listeners were able to use the pitch contrasts systematically in making these categorisations.
  • Bruggeman, L., & Cutler, A. (2020). No L1 privilege in talker adaptation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(3), 681-693. doi:10.1017/S1366728919000646.

    Abstract

    As a rule, listening is easier in first (L1) than second languages (L2); difficult L2 listening can challenge even highly proficient users. We here examine one particular listening function, adaptation to novel talkers, in such a high-proficiency population: Dutch emigrants to Australia, predominantly using English outside the family, but all also retaining L1 proficiency. Using lexically-guided perceptual learning (Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 2003), we investigated these listeners’ adaptation to an ambiguous speech sound, in parallel experiments in both their L1 and their L2. A control study established that perceptual learning outcomes were unaffected by the procedural measures required for this double comparison. The emigrants showed equivalent proficiency in tests in both languages, robust perceptual adaptation in their L2, English, but no adaptation in L1. We propose that adaptation to novel talkers is a language-specific skill requiring regular novel practice; a limited set of known (family) interlocutors cannot meet this requirement.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2020). Universals of listening: Equivalent prosodic entrainment in tone and non-tone languages. Cognition, 202: 104311. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104311.

    Abstract

    In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. Here, we ask whether this strategy is universally available, even in languages with very different phonological systems (e.g., tone versus non-tone languages). In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment also occurs in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where the use of various suprasegmental cues to lexical identity may take precedence over their use in salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted high stress on the target-bearing word, and the lexical tone of the target word (i.e., rising versus falling) did not affect the Mandarin listeners' response. Further, the extent to which prosodic entrainment was used to detect the target phoneme was the same in both English and Mandarin listeners. Nevertheless, native Mandarin speakers did not adopt an entrainment strategy when the sentences were presented in English, consistent with the suggestion that L2 listening may be strained by additional functional load from prosodic processing. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the perception of focus structure in everyday discourse.

    Additional information

    supplementary data
  • Yu, J., Mailhammer, R., & Cutler, A. (2020). Vocabulary structure affects word recognition: Evidence from German listeners. In N. Minematsu, M. Kondo, T. Arai, & R. Hayashi (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020 (pp. 474-478). Tokyo: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-97.

    Abstract

    Lexical stress is realised similarly in English, German, and
    Dutch. On a suprasegmental level, stressed syllables tend to be
    longer and more acoustically salient than unstressed syllables;
    segmentally, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced.
    The frequency of unreduced unstressed syllables (where only
    the suprasegmental cues indicate lack of stress) however,
    differs across the languages. The present studies test whether
    listener behaviour is affected by these vocabulary differences,
    by investigating German listeners’ use of suprasegmental cues
    to lexical stress in German and English word recognition. In a
    forced-choice identification task, German listeners correctly
    assigned single-syllable fragments (e.g., Kon-) to one of two
    words differing in stress (KONto, konZEPT). Thus, German
    listeners can exploit suprasegmental information for
    identifying words. German listeners also performed above
    chance in a similar task in English (with, e.g., DIver, diVERT),
    i.e., their sensitivity to these cues also transferred to a nonnative
    language. An English listener group, in contrast, failed
    in the English fragment task. These findings mirror vocabulary
    patterns: German has more words with unreduced unstressed
    syllables than English does.
  • Mandal, S., Best, C. T., Shaw, J., & Cutler, A. (2020). Bilingual phonology in dichotic perception: A case study of Malayalam and English voicing. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1): 73. doi:10.5334/gjgl.853.

    Abstract

    Listeners often experience cocktail-party situations, encountering multiple ongoing conversa-
    tions while tracking just one. Capturing the words spoken under such conditions requires selec-
    tive attention and processing, which involves using phonetic details to discern phonological
    structure. How do bilinguals accomplish this in L1-L2 competition? We addressed that question
    using a dichotic listening task with fluent Malayalam-English bilinguals, in which they were pre-
    sented with synchronized nonce words, one in each language in separate ears, with competing
    onsets of a labial stop (Malayalam) and a labial fricative (English), both voiced or both voiceless.
    They were required to attend to the Malayalam or the English item, in separate blocks, and report
    the initial consonant they heard. We found that perceptual intrusions from the unattended to the
    attended language were influenced by voicing, with more intrusions on voiced than voiceless tri-
    als. This result supports our proposal for the feature specification of consonants in Malayalam-
    English bilinguals, which makes use of privative features, underspecification and the “standard
    approach” to laryngeal features, as against “laryngeal realism”. Given this representational
    account, we observe that intrusions result from phonetic properties in the unattended signal
    being assimilated to the closest matching phonological category in the attended language, and
    are more likely for segments with a greater number of phonological feature specifications.
  • Ullas, S., Formisano, E., Eisner, F., & Cutler, A. (2020). Interleaved lexical and audiovisual information can retune phoneme boundaries. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 82, 2018-2026. doi:10.3758/s13414-019-01961-8.

    Abstract

    To adapt to situations in which speech perception is difficult, listeners can adjust boundaries between phoneme categories using perceptual learning. Such adjustments can draw on lexical information in surrounding speech, or on visual cues via speech-reading. In the present study, listeners proved they were able to flexibly adjust the boundary between two plosive/stop consonants, /p/-/t/, using both lexical and speech-reading information and given the same experimental design for both cue types. Videos of a speaker pronouncing pseudo-words and audio recordings of Dutch words were presented in alternating blocks of either stimulus type. Listeners were able to switch between cues to adjust phoneme boundaries, and resulting effects were comparable to results from listeners receiving only a single source of information. Overall, audiovisual cues (i.e., the videos) produced the stronger effects, commensurate with their applicability for adapting to noisy environments. Lexical cues were able to induce effects with fewer exposure stimuli and a changing phoneme bias, in a design unlike most prior studies of lexical retuning. While lexical retuning effects were relatively weaker compared to audiovisual recalibration, this discrepancy could reflect how lexical retuning may be more suitable for adapting to speakers than to environments. Nonetheless, the presence of the lexical retuning effects suggests that it may be invoked at a faster rate than previously seen. In general, this technique has further illuminated the robustness of adaptability in speech perception, and offers the potential to enable further comparisons across differing forms of perceptual learning.
  • Ullas, S., Formisano, E., Eisner, F., & Cutler, A. (2020). Audiovisual and lexical cues do not additively enhance perceptual adaptation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 707-715. doi:10.3758/s13423-020-01728-5.

    Abstract

    When listeners experience difficulty in understanding a speaker, lexical and audiovisual (or lipreading) information can be a helpful source of guidance. These two types of information embedded in speech can also guide perceptual adjustment, also
    known as recalibration or perceptual retuning. With retuning or recalibration, listeners can use these contextual cues to temporarily or permanently reconfigure internal representations of phoneme categories to adjust to and understand novel interlocutors more easily. These two types of perceptual learning, previously investigated in large part separately, are highly similar in allowing listeners to use speech-external information to make phoneme boundary adjustments. This study explored whether the two sources may work in conjunction to induce adaptation, thus emulating real life, in which listeners are indeed likely to encounter both types of cue together. Listeners who received combined audiovisual and lexical cues showed perceptual learning effects
    similar to listeners who only received audiovisual cues, while listeners who received only lexical cues showed weaker effects compared with the two other groups. The combination of cues did not lead to additive retuning or recalibration effects, suggesting that lexical and audiovisual cues operate differently with regard to how listeners use them for reshaping perceptual categories.
    Reaction times did not significantly differ across the three conditions, so none of the forms of adjustment were either aided or
    hindered by processing time differences. Mechanisms underlying these forms of perceptual learning may diverge in numerous ways despite similarities in experimental applications.

    Additional information

    Data and materials
  • Ullas, S., Hausfeld, L., Cutler, A., Eisner, F., & Formisano, E. (2020). Neural correlates of phonetic adaptation as induced by lexical and audiovisual context. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(11), 2145-2158. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01608.

    Abstract

    When speech perception is difficult, one way listeners adjust is by reconfiguring phoneme category boundaries, drawing on contextual information. Both lexical knowledge and lipreading cues are used in this way, but it remains unknown whether these two differing forms of perceptual learning are similar at a neural level. This study compared phoneme boundary adjustments driven by lexical or audiovisual cues, using ultra-high-field 7-T fMRI. During imaging, participants heard exposure stimuli and test stimuli. Exposure stimuli for lexical retuning were audio recordings of words, and those for audiovisual recalibration were audio–video recordings of lip movements during utterances of pseudowords. Test stimuli were ambiguous phonetic strings presented without context, and listeners reported what phoneme they heard. Reports reflected phoneme biases in preceding exposure blocks (e.g., more reported /p/ after /p/-biased exposure). Analysis of corresponding brain responses indicated that both forms of cue use were associated with a network of activity across the temporal cortex, plus parietal, insula, and motor areas. Audiovisual recalibration also elicited significant occipital cortex activity despite the lack of visual stimuli. Activity levels in several ROIs also covaried with strength of audiovisual recalibration, with greater activity accompanying larger recalibration shifts. Similar activation patterns appeared for lexical retuning, but here, no significant ROIs were identified. Audiovisual and lexical forms of perceptual learning thus induce largely similar brain response patterns. However, audiovisual recalibration involves additional visual cortex contributions, suggesting that previously acquired visual information (on lip movements) is retrieved and deployed to disambiguate auditory perception.
  • Cooper, N., & Cutler, A. (2004). Perception of non-native phonemes in noise. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 469-472). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We report an investigation of the perception of American English phonemes by Dutch listeners proficient in English. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in most possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (16 dB, 8 dB, and 0 dB). Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on vowel and consonant identification are discussed as a function of syllable position and of relationship to the native phoneme inventory. Comparison of the results with previously reported data from native listeners reveals that noise affected the responding of native and non-native listeners similarly.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). Phonemic repertoire and similarity within the vocabulary. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 65-68). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    Language-specific differences in the size and distribution of the phonemic repertoire can have implications for the task facing listeners in recognising spoken words. A language with more phonemes will allow shorter words and reduced embedding of short words within longer ones, decreasing the potential for spurious lexical competitors to be activated by speech signals. We demonstrate that this is the case via comparative analyses of the vocabularies of English and Spanish. A language which uses suprasegmental as well as segmental contrasts, however, can substantially reduce the extent of spurious embedding.
  • Cutler, A. (2004). Segmentation of spoken language by normal adult listeners. In R. Kent (Ed.), MIT encyclopedia of communication sciences and disorders (pp. 392-395). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., Weber, A., Smits, R., & Cooper, N. (2004). Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(6), 3668-3678. doi:10.1121/1.1810292.

    Abstract

    Native American English and non-native(Dutch)listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios(0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification
    performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.
  • Cutler, A. (2004). On spoken-word recognition in a second language. Newsletter, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 47, 15-15.
  • Cutler, A., & Henton, C. G. (2004). There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. In H. Quené, & V. Van Heuven (Eds.), On speech and Language: Studies for Sieb G. Nooteboom (pp. 37-45). Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.

    Abstract

    The retiring academic may look back upon, inter alia, years of conference attendance. Speech error researchers are uniquely fortunate because they can collect data in any situation involving communication; accordingly, the retiring speech error researcher will have collected data at those conferences. We here address the issue of whether error data collected in situations involving conviviality (such as at conferences) is representative of error data in general. Our approach involved a comparison, across three levels of linguistic processing, between a specially constructed Conviviality Sample and the largest existing source of speech error data, the newly available Fromkin Speech Error Database. The results indicate that there are grounds for regarding the data in the Conviviality Sample as a better than average reflection of the true population of all errors committed. These findings encourage us to recommend further data collection in collaboration with like-minded colleagues.
  • Cutler, A. (2004). Twee regels voor academische vorming. In H. Procee (Ed.), Bij die wereld wil ik horen! Zesendertig columns en drie essays over de vorming tot academicus. (pp. 42-45). Amsterdam: Boom.
  • Cutler, A., Mister, E., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). La perception de la parole en espagnol: Un cas particulier? In L. Ferrand, & J. Grainger (Eds.), Psycholinguistique cognitive: Essais en l'honneur de Juan Segui (pp. 57-74). Brussels: De Boeck.
  • Indefrey, P., & Cutler, A. (2004). Prelexical and lexical processing in listening. In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences III. (pp. 759-774). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Abstract

    This paper presents a meta-analysis of hemodynamic studies on passive auditory language processing. We assess the overlap of hemodynamic activation areas and activation maxima reported in experiments involving the presentation of sentences, words, pseudowords, or sublexical or non-linguistic auditory stimuli. Areas that have been reliably replicated are identified. The results of the meta-analysis are compared to electrophysiological, magnetencephalic (MEG), and clinical findings. It is concluded that auditory language input is processed in a left posterior frontal and bilateral temporal cortical network. Within this network, no processing leve l is related to a single cortical area. The temporal lobes seem to differ with respect to their involvement in post-lexical processing, in that the left temporal lobe has greater involvement than the right, and also in the degree of anatomical specialization for phonological, lexical, and sentence -level processing, with greater overlap on the right contrasting with a higher degree of differentiation on the left.
  • Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2004). Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 50(1), 1-25. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00105-0.

    Abstract

    Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, ‘lid,’ given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners.
  • Clifton, Jr., C., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Van Ooijen, B. (1999). The processing of inflected forms. [Commentary on H. Clahsen: Lexical entries and rules of language.]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1018-1019.

    Abstract

    Clashen proposes two distinct processing routes, for regularly and irregularly inflected forms, respectively, and thus is apparently making a psychological claim. We argue his position, which embodies a strictly linguistic perspective, does not constitute a psychological processing model.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton, Jr., C. (1999). Comprehending spoken language: A blueprint of the listener. In C. M. Brown, & P. Hagoort (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 123-166). Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Foreword. In Slips of the Ear: Errors in the perception of Casual Conversation (pp. xiii-xv). New York City, NY, USA: Academic Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Prosodische Struktur und Worterkennung bei gesprochener Sprache. In A. D. Friedrici (Ed.), Enzyklopädie der Psychologie: Sprachrezeption (pp. 49-83). Göttingen: Hogrefe.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Prosody and intonation, processing issues. In R. A. Wilson, & F. C. Keil (Eds.), MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp. 682-683). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1999). Sharpening Ockham’s razor (Commentary on W.J.M. Levelt, A. Roelofs & A.S. Meyer: A theory of lexical access in speech production). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 40-41.

    Abstract

    Language production and comprehension are intimately interrelated; and models of production and comprehension should, we argue, be constrained by common architectural guidelines. Levelt et al.'s target article adopts as guiding principle Ockham's razor: the best model of production is the simplest one. We recommend adoption of the same principle in comprehension, with consequent simplification of some well-known types of models.
  • Cutler, A. (1999). Spoken-word recognition. In R. A. Wilson, & F. C. Keil (Eds.), MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences (pp. 796-798). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1999). Pitch accent in spoken-word recognition in Japanese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105, 1877-1888.

    Abstract

    Three experiments addressed the question of whether pitch-accent information may be exploited in the process of recognizing spoken words in Tokyo Japanese. In a two-choice classification task, listeners judged from which of two words, differing in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted ~e.g., ka from baka HL or gaka LH!; most judgments were correct, and listeners’ decisions were correlated with the fundamental frequency characteristics of the syllables. In a gating experiment, listeners heard initial fragments of words and guessed what the words were; their guesses overwhelmingly had the same initial accent structure as the gated word even when only the beginning CV of the stimulus ~e.g., na- from nagasa HLL or nagashi LHH! was presented. In addition, listeners were more confident in guesses with the same initial accent structure as the stimulus than in guesses with different accent. In a lexical decision experiment, responses to spoken words ~e.g., ame HL! were speeded by previous presentation of the same word ~e.g., ame HL! but not by previous presentation of a word differing only in accent ~e.g., ame LH!. Together these findings provide strong evidence that accentual information constrains the activation and selection of candidates for spoken-word recognition.
  • Cutler, A., Van Ooijen, B., & Norris, D. (1999). Vowels, consonants, and lexical activation. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 3 (pp. 2053-2056). Berkeley: University of California.

    Abstract

    Two lexical decision studies examined the effects of single-phoneme mismatches on lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. One study was carried out in English, and involved spoken primes and visually presented lexical decision targets. The other study was carried out in Dutch, and primes and targets were both presented auditorily. Facilitation was found only for spoken targets preceded immediately by spoken primes; no facilitation occurred when targets were presented visually, or when intervening input occurred between prime and target. The effects of vowel mismatches and consonant mismatches were equivalent.
  • McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1999). Lexical influence in phonetic decision-making: Evidence from subcategorical mismatches. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1363-1389. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.25.5.1363.

    Abstract

    In 5 experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. However, in lexical decision and 1 of 3 phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a sixth experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to interitem differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision making (the Race model, the TRACE model, and a postlexical model) did not explain the data. A new bottom-up model is outlined that accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage.
  • Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (1999). Perception of suprasegmental structure in a nonnative dialect. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 229-253. doi:10.1006/jpho.1999.0095.

    Abstract

    Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.
  • Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Cutler, A. (1999). The prosody of speech error corrections revisited. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 2 (pp. 1483-1486). Berkely: University of California.

    Abstract

    A corpus of digitized speech errors is used to compare the prosody of correction patterns for word-level vs. sound-level errors. Results for both peak F0 and perceived prosodic markedness confirm that speakers are more likely to mark corrections of word-level errors than corrections of sound-level errors, and that errors ambiguous between word-level and soundlevel (such as boat for moat) show correction patterns like those for sound level errors. This finding increases the plausibility of the claim that word-sound-ambiguous errors arise at the same level of processing as sound errors that do not form words.
  • Van Donselaar, W., Kuijpers, C. T., & Cutler, A. (1999). Facilitatory effects of vowel epenthesis on word processing in Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 59-77. doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2635.

    Abstract

    We report a series of experiments examining the effects on word processing of insertion of an optional epenthetic vowel in word-final consonant clusters in Dutch. Such epenthesis turns film, for instance, into film. In a word-reversal task listeners treated words with and without epenthesis alike, as monosyllables, suggesting that the variant forms both activate the same canonical representation, that of a monosyllabic word without epenthesis. In both lexical decision and word spotting, response times to recognize words were significantly faster when epenthesis was present than when the word was presented in its canonical form without epenthesis. It is argued that addition of the epenthetic vowel makes the liquid consonants constituting the first member of a cluster more perceptible; a final phoneme-detection experiment confirmed that this was the case. These findings show that a transformed variant of a word, although it contacts the lexicon via the representation of the canonical form, can be more easily perceptible than that canonical form.
  • Butterfield, S., & Cutler, A. (1990). Intonational cues to word boundaries in clear speech? In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics: Vol 12, part 10 (pp. 87-94). St. Albans, Herts.: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1990). Durational cues to word boundaries in clear speech. Speech Communication, 9, 485-495.

    Abstract

    One of a listener’s major tasks in understanding continuous speech in segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to makr word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggest 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.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Robinson, K. (1990). Elizabeth and John: Sound patterns of men’s and women’s names. Journal of Linguistics, 26, 471-482. doi:10.1017/S0022226700014754.
  • Cutler, A. (1990). From performance to phonology: Comments on Beckman and Edwards's paper. In J. Kingston, & M. Beckman (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and physics of speech (pp. 208-214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1990). Exploiting prosodic probabilities in speech segmentation. In G. Altmann (Ed.), Cognitive models of speech processing: Psycholinguistic and computational perspectives (pp. 105-121). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Scott, D. R. (1990). Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11, 253-272. doi:10.1017/S0142716400008882.

    Abstract

    It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.
  • Cutler, A. (1990). Syllabic lengthening as a word boundary cue. In R. Seidl (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 324-328). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Bisyllabic sequences which could be interpreted as one word or two were produced in sentence contexts by a trained speaker, and syllabic durations measured. Listeners judged whether the bisyllables, excised from context, were one word or two. The proportion of two-word choices correlated positively with measured duration, but only for bisyllables stressed on the second syllable. The results may suggest a limit for listener sensitivity to syllabic lengthening as a word boundary cue.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Van Ooijen, B. (1990). Vowels as phoneme detection targets. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 581-584).

    Abstract

    Phoneme detection is a psycholinguistic task in which listeners' response time to detect the presence of a pre-specified phoneme target is measured. Typically, detection tasks have used consonant targets. This paper reports two experiments in which subjects responded to vowels as phoneme detection targets. In the first experiment, targets occurred in real words, in the second in nonsense words. Response times were long by comparison with consonantal targets. Targets in initial syllables were responded to much more slowly than targets in second syllables. Strong vowels were responded to faster than reduced vowels in real words but not in nonwords. These results suggest that the process of phoneme detection produces different results for vowels and for consonants. We discuss possible explanations for this difference, in particular the possibility of language-specificity.
  • Mehler, J., & Cutler, A. (1990). Psycholinguistic implications of phonological diversity among languages. In M. Piattelli-Palmerini (Ed.), Cognitive science in Europe: Issues and trends (pp. 119-134). Rome: Golem.
  • Cutler, A. (1986). Forbear is a homophone: Lexical prosody does not constrain lexical access. Language and Speech, 29, 201-220.

    Abstract

    Because stress can occur in any position within an Eglish word, lexical prosody could serve as a minimal distinguishing feature between pairs of words. However, most pairs of English words with stress pattern opposition also differ vocalically: OBject an obJECT, CONtent and content have different vowels in their first syllables an well as different stress patters. To test whether prosodic information is made use in auditory word recognition independently of segmental phonetic information, it is necessary to examine pairs like FORbear – forBEAR of TRUSty – trusTEE, semantically unrelated words which echbit stress pattern opposition but no segmental difference. In a cross-modal priming task, such words produce the priming effects characteristic of homophones, indicating that lexical prosody is not used in the same was as segmental structure to constrain lexical access.
  • Cutler, A. (1986). Phonological structure in speech recognition. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 161-178. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615397.

    Abstract

    Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recog- nition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be difficult, since the results of studies designed to test processing models are often of limited relevance to phonological theory.
  • Cutler, A., & Swinney, D. A. (1986). Prosody and the development of comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 14, 145-167.

    Abstract

    Four studies are reported in which young children’s response time to detect word targets was measured. Children under about six years of age did not show response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show. When semantic focus of the target word was manipulated independently of accent, children of about five years of age showed an adult-like response time advantage for focussed targets, but children younger than five did not. Id is argued that the processing advantage for accented words reflect the semantic role of accent as an expression of sentence focus. Processing advantages for accented words depend on the prior development of representations of sentence semantic structure, including the concept of focus. The previous literature on the development of prosodic competence shows an apparent anomaly in that young children’s productive skills appear to outstrip their receptive skills; however, this anomaly disappears if very young children’s prosody is assumed to be produced without an underlying representation of the relationship between prosody and semantics.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1986). The perceptual integrity of initial consonant clusters. In R. Lawrence (Ed.), Speech and Hearing: Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics (pp. 31-36). Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1986). The syllable’s differing role in the segmentation of French and English. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 385-400. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(86)90033-1.

    Abstract

    Speech segmentation procedures may differ in speakers of different languages. Earlier work based on French speakers listening to French words suggested that the syllable functions as a segmentation unit in speech processing. However, while French has relatively regular and clearly bounded syllables, other languages, such as English, do not. No trace of syllabifying segmentation was found in English listeners listening to English words, French words, or nonsense words. French listeners, however, showed evidence of syllabification even when they were listening to English words. We conclude that alternative segmentation routines are available to the human language processor. In some cases speech segmentation may involve the operation of more than one procedure
  • Cutler, A. (1986). Why readers of this newsletter should run cross-linguistic experiments. European Psycholinguistics Association Newsletter, 13, 4-8.
  • Cutler, A. (1974). On saying what you mean without meaning what you say. In M. Galy, R. Fox, & A. Bruck (Eds.), Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 117-127). Chicago, Ill.: CLS.

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