Anne Cutler †

Publications

Displaying 1 - 35 of 35
  • Allerhand, M., Butterfield, S., Cutler, A., & Patterson, R. (1992). Assessing syllable strength via an auditory model. In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics: Vol. 14 Part 6 (pp. 297-304). St. Albans, Herts: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Cross-linguistic differences in speech segmentation. MRC News, 56, 8-9.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1992). Detection of vowels and consonants with minimal acoustic variation. Speech Communication, 11, 101-108. doi:10.1016/0167-6393(92)90004-Q.

    Abstract

    Previous research has shown that, in a phoneme detection task, vowels produce longer reaction times than consonants, suggesting that they are harder to perceive. One possible explanation for this difference is based upon their respective acoustic/articulatory characteristics. Another way of accounting for the findings would be to relate them to the differential functioning of vowels and consonants in the syllabic structure of words. In this experiment, we examined the second possibility. Targets were two pairs of phonemes, each containing a vowel and a consonant with similar phonetic characteristics. Subjects heard lists of English words had to press a response key upon detecting the occurrence of a pre-specified target. This time, the phonemes which functioned as vowels in syllabic structure yielded shorter reaction times than those which functioned as consonants. This rules out an explanation for response time difference between vowels and consonants in terms of function in syllable structure. Instead, we propose that consonantal and vocalic segments differ with respect to variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the representation of targets by listeners.
  • Cutler, A., Kearns, R., Norris, D., & Scott, D. (1992). Listeners’ responses to extraneous signals coincident with English and French speech. In J. Pittam (Ed.), Proceedings of the 4th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 666-671). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    English and French listeners performed two tasks - click location and speeded click detection - with both English and French sentences, closely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were located more accurately in open- than in closed-class words in both English and French; they were detected more rapidly in open- than in closed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level linguistic processing was not involved in these tasks.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Proceedings with confidence. New Scientist, (1825), 54.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Processing constraints of the native phonological repertoire on the native language. In Y. Tohkura, E. Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Y. Sagisaka (Eds.), Speech perception, production and linguistic structure (pp. 275-278). Tokyo: Ohmsha.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Psychology and the segment. In G. Docherty, & D. Ladd (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology II: Gesture, segment, prosody (pp. 290-295). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Robinson, T. (1992). Response time as a metric for comparison of speech recognition by humans and machines. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 189-192). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    The performance of automatic speech recognition systems is usually assessed in terms of error rate. Human speech recognition produces few errors, but relative difficulty of processing can be assessed via response time techniques. We report the construction of a measure analogous to response time in a machine recognition system. This measure may be compared directly with human response times. We conducted a trial comparison of this type at the phoneme level, including both tense and lax vowels and a variety of consonant classes. The results suggested similarities between human and machine processing in the case of consonants, but differences in the case of vowels.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1992). Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 218-236. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(92)90012-M.

    Abstract

    Segmentation of continuous speech into its component words is a nontrivial task for listeners. Previous work has suggested that listeners develop heuristic segmentation procedures based on experience with the structure of their language; for English, the heuristic is that strong syllables (containing full vowels) are most likely to be the initial syllables of lexical words, whereas weak syllables (containing central, or reduced, vowels) are nonword-initial, or, if word-initial, are grammatical words. This hypothesis is here tested against natural and laboratory-induced missegmentations of continuous speech. Precisely the expected pattern is found: listeners erroneously insert boundaries before strong syllables but delete them before weak syllables; boundaries inserted before strong syllables produce lexical words, while boundaries inserted before weak syllables produce grammatical words.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). The perception of speech: Psycholinguistic aspects. In W. Bright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of language: Vol. 3 (pp. 181-183). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). The production and perception of word boundaries. In Y. Tohkura, E. Vatikiotis-Bateson, & Y. Sagisaka (Eds.), Speech perception, production and linguistic structure (pp. 419-425). Tokyo: Ohsma.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1992). The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 381-410.

    Abstract

    Monolingual French speakers employ a syllable-based procedure in speech segmentation; monolingual English speakers use a stress-based segmentation procedure and do not use the syllable-based procedure. In the present study French-English bilinguals participated in segmentation experiments with English and French materials. Their results as a group did not simply mimic the performance of English monolinguals with English language materials and of French monolinguals with French language materials. Instead, the bilinguals formed two groups, defined by forced choice of a dominant language. Only the French-dominant group showed syllabic segmentation and only with French language materials. The English-dominant group showed no syllabic segmentation in either language. However, the English-dominant group showed stress-based segmentation with English language materials; the French-dominant group did not. We argue that rhythmically based segmentation procedures are mutually exclusive, as a consequence of which speech segmentation by bilinguals is, in one respect at least, functionally monolingual.
  • Cutler, A. (1992). Why not abolish psycholinguistics? In W. Dressler, H. Luschützky, O. Pfeiffer, & J. Rennison (Eds.), Phonologica 1988 (pp. 77-87). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1992). Words within words: Lexical statistics and lexical access. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 221-224). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    This paper presents lexical statistics on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in other words. We report the results of an analysis of 25000 words, varying in length from two to six syllables, extracted from a phonetically-coded English dictionary (The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Each syllable, and each string of syllables within each word was checked against the dictionary. Two analyses are presented: the first used a complete list of polysyllables, with look-up on the entire dictionary; the second used a sublist of content words, counting only embedded words which were themselves content words. The results have important implications for models of human speech recognition. The efficiency of these models depends, in different ways, on the number and location of words within words.
  • Norris, D., Van Ooijen, B., & Cutler, A. (1992). Speeded detection of vowels and steady-state consonants. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing; Vol. 2 (pp. 1055-1058). Alberta: University of Alberta.

    Abstract

    We report two experiments in which vowels and steady-state consonants served as targets in a speeded detection task. In the first experiment, two vowels were compared with one voiced and once unvoiced fricative. Response times (RTs) to the vowels were longer than to the fricatives. The error rate was higher for the consonants. Consonants in word-final position produced the shortest RTs, For the vowels, RT correlated negatively with target duration. In the second experiment, the same two vowel targets were compared with two nasals. This time there was no significant difference in RTs, but the error rate was still significantly higher for the consonants. Error rate and length correlated negatively for the vowels only. We conclude that RT differences between phonemes are independent of vocalic or consonantal status. Instead, we argue that the process of phoneme detection reflects more finely grained differences in acoustic/articulatory structure within the phonemic repertoire.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1983). A language-specific comprehension strategy [Letters to Nature]. Nature, 304, 159-160. doi:10.1038/304159a0.

    Abstract

    Infants acquire whatever language is spoken in the environment into which they are born. The mental capability of the newborn child is not biased in any way towards the acquisition of one human language rather than another. Because psychologists who attempt to model the process of language comprehension are interested in the structure of the human mind, rather than in the properties of individual languages, strategies which they incorporate in their models are presumed to be universal, not language-specific. In other words, strategies of comprehension are presumed to be characteristic of the human language processing system, rather than, say, the French, English, or Igbo language processing systems. We report here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not by native speakers of English.
  • Cutler, A. (1983). Lexical complexity and sentence processing. In G. B. Flores d'Arcais, & R. J. Jarvella (Eds.), The process of language understanding (pp. 43-79). Chichester, Sussex: Wiley.
  • Cutler, A., & Ladd, D. R. (Eds.). (1983). Prosody: Models and measurements. Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A. (1983). Semantics, syntax and sentence accent. In M. Van den Broecke, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 85-91). Dordrecht: Foris.
  • Cutler, A. (1983). Speakers’ conceptions of the functions of prosody. In A. Cutler, & D. R. Ladd (Eds.), Prosody: Models and measurements (pp. 79-91). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Ladd, D. R., & Cutler, A. (1983). Models and measurements in the study of prosody. In A. Cutler, & D. R. Ladd (Eds.), Prosody: Models and measurements (pp. 1-10). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Cutler, A. (1983). Prosodic marking in speech repair. Journal of semantics, 2, 205-217. doi:10.1093/semant/2.2.205.

    Abstract

    Spontaneous self-corrections in speech pose a communication problem; the speaker must make clear to the listener not only that the original Utterance was faulty, but where it was faulty and how the fault is to be corrected. Prosodic marking of corrections - making the prosody of the repair noticeably different from that of the original utterance - offers a resource which the speaker can exploit to provide the listener with such information. A corpus of more than 400 spontaneous speech repairs was analysed, and the prosodic characteristics compared with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each repair. Prosodic marking showed no relationship at all with the syntactic characteristics of repairs. Instead, marking was associated with certain semantic factors: repairs were marked when the original utterance had been actually erroneous, rather than simply less appropriate than the repair; and repairs tended to be marked more often when the set of items encompassing the error and the repair was small rather than when it was large. These findings lend further weight to the characterization of accent as essentially semantic in function.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). Degrees of transparency in word formation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 26, 73-77.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). Making up materials is a confounded nuisance, or: Will we able to run any psycholinguistic experiments at all in 1990? Cognition, 10, 65-70. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(81)90026-3.
  • Cutler, A., & Darwin, C. J. (1981). Phoneme-monitoring reaction time and preceding prosody: Effects of stop closure duration and of fundamental frequency. Perception and Psychophysics, 29, 217-224. Retrieved from http://www.psychonomic.org/search/view.cgi?id=12660.

    Abstract

    In an earlier study, it was shown that listeners can use prosodic cues that predict where sentence stress will fall; phoneme-monitoring RTs are faster when the preceding prosody indicates that the word bearing the target will be stressed. Two experiments which further investigate this effect are described. In the first, it is shown that the duration of the closure preceding the release of the target stop consonant burst does not affect the RT advantage for stressed words. In the second, it is shown that fundamental frequency variation is not a necessary component of the prosodic variation that produces the predicted-stress effect. It is argued that sentence processing involves a very flexible use of prosodic information.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). The cognitive reality of suprasegmental phonology. In T. Myers, J. Laver, & J. Anderson (Eds.), The cognitive representation of speech (pp. 399-400). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). The reliability of speech error data. Linguistics, 19, 561-582.
  • Fodor, J. A., & Cutler, A. (1981). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7, 49-59. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(79)90010-6.

    Abstract

    Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was found to be faster when the word in which the target occurred formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Focus was determined by asking a question before the sentence; that part of the sentence which comprised the answer to the sentence was assumed to be focussed. This procedure made it possible to vary position offocus within the sentence while holding all acoustic aspects of the sentence itself constant. It is argued that sentence understanding is facilitated by rapid identification of focussed information. Since focussed words are usually accented, it is further argued that the active search for accented words demonstrated in previous research should be interpreted as a search for semantic focus.
  • Garnham, A., Shillcock, R. C., Brown, G. D. A., Mill, A. I. D., & Cutler, A. (1981). Slips of the tongue in the London-Lund corpus of spontaneous conversation. Linguistics, 19, 805-817.
  • Cutler, A. (1979). Beyond parsing and lexical look-up. In R. J. Wales, & E. C. T. Walker (Eds.), New approaches to language mechanisms: a collection of psycholinguistic studies (pp. 133-149). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
  • Cutler, A. (1979). Contemporary reaction to Rudolf Meringer’s speech error research. Historiograpia Linguistica, 6, 57-76.
  • Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1979). Monitoring sentence comprehension. In W. E. Cooper, & E. C. T. Walker (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett (pp. 113-134). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
  • Swinney, D. A., & Cutler, A. (1979). The access and processing of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Verbal Learning an Verbal Behavior, 18, 523-534. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(79)90284-6.

    Abstract

    Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases. In both studies a Phrase Classification Task was utilized. In this, reaction times to determine whether or not word strings constituted acceptable English phrases were measured. Classification times were significantly faster to idiom than to matched control phrases. This effect held under conditions involving different categories of idioms, different transitional probabilities among words in the phrases, and different levels of awareness of the presence of idioms in the materials. The data support a Lexical Representation Hypothesis for the processing of idioms.
  • Cutler, A. (1976). High-stress words are easier to perceive than low-stress words, even when they are equally stressed. Texas Linguistic Forum, 2, 53-57.
  • Cutler, A. (1976). Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour. Perception and Psychophysics, 20, 55-60. Retrieved from http://www.psychonomic.org/search/view.cgi?id=18194.

    Abstract

    An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact that no acoustic correlates of stress were present. It is concluded that a part of the sentence comprehension process is the prediction of upcoming sentence accents.

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