"Processing speaker variability in lexical tone perception"
Abstract: Acoustic-phonetic research has shown that phonologically identical utterances can vary significantly across speakers. However, listeners can easily understand sounds and words spoken by different speakers. How do listeners deal with such speaker variability to achieve perceptual constancy? I will discuss recent work in my lab on the effect of speaker variability on lexical tone perception by native and non-native listeners. Contrary to intuition, speaker variability does not seem to disrupt non-native tone perception disproportionately. This finding will be compared to the effects of other sources of acoustic variability on tone perception.
Bio: Chao-Yang Lee is an associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Ohio University. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from Brown University. His research explores the role of lexical tones in speech perception and spoken word recognition. For more information, see http://www.ohio.edu/people/leec1.
Co-sponsor: Department of Linguistics at OSU, Foreign Language Center and Speech & Hearing's SPA Labs
