Published in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 30, Issue 4, April 2018, 540-551 Abstract “The motor cortex and cerebellum are thought to be critical for learning and maintaining motor behaviors. Here we use transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the role of the motor cortex and cerebellum in sensorimotor learning in speech. During productions of “head,” “bed,” and “dead,” the first formant of the vowel sound was altered in real time toward the first formant of the vowel sound in “had,” “bad,” and “dad.” Compensatory changes in first and second formant production were used as a measure of motor adaptation.… Read More
The phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation in natural speech
Published in: Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 100, June 2018, 61-88 Abstract “Evidence suggests that speakers hyperarticulate phonetic cues to word identity in a way that increases phonetic distance to similar competitors. However, the degree and type of phonetic similarity between competitors which induces hyperarticulation remains unclear. Here, we compared neighborhood density (as a representative of a phonetically-general type of similarity) to the existence of a phonetic cue-specific lexical minimal pair in terms of their ability to predict hyperarticulation of two different cue-types in a corpus of natural English speech. For all phonetic cues that we investigated – word-initial voiceless… Read More
Can the first letter advantage be shaped by script-specific characteristics?
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Volume 44, Issue 3, 493-500 Abstract “We examined whether the first letter advantage that has been reported in the Roman script disappears, or even reverses, depending on the characteristics of the orthography. We chose Thai because it has several “nonaligned” vowels that are written prior to the consonant but phonologically follow it in speech (e.g., แฟน<ε:fn> is spoken as /fɛ:n/) whereas other “aligned” vowels are written and spoken in a corresponding order, as occurs in English (e.g., ฟาก is spoken as /fa:k/). We employed the forced choice decision paradigm of Adelman,… Read More
Combined effects of form- and meaning-based predictability on perceived clarity of speech
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 44, Issue 2, 277-285 Abstract “The perceptual clarity of speech is influenced by more than just the acoustic quality of the sound; it also depends on contextual support. For example, a degraded sentence is perceived to be clearer when the content of the speech signal is provided with matching text (i.e., form-based predictability) before hearing the degraded sentence. Here, we investigate whether sentence-level semantic coherence (i.e., meaning-based predictability), enhances perceptual clarity of degraded sentences, and if so, whether the mechanism is the same as that underlying enhancement by matching text.… Read More
Identifying the locus of compatibility-based backward crosstalk: Evidence from an extended PRP paradigm
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 44, Issue 2, 261-276 Abstract “The backward crosstalk effect (BCE) in dual tasking means that characteristics of Task 2 of 2 subsequently performed tasks influence Task 1 performance. This observation indicates that certain features of the second response are already activated to some degree before the first response is selected. Therefore, the BCE challenges bottleneck models, which assume that Task 2 response selection does not begin until Task 1 response selection is finished. Instead, an extended model with a capacity-unlimited response activation stage prior to the bottleneck as the locus… Read More
Musical competence and phoneme perception in a foreign language
Published in: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Volume 24, Issue 6, December 2017, 1929-1934 Abstract “We investigated whether musical competence was associated with the perception of foreign-language phonemes. The sample comprised adult native-speakers of English who varied in music training. The measures included tests of general cognitive abilities, melody and rhythm perception, and the perception of consonantal contrasts that were phonemic in Zulu but not in English. Music training was associated positively with performance on the tests of melody and rhythm perception, but not with performance on the phoneme-perception task. In other words, we found no evidence for transfer of music training… Read More