The Effect of Habitual Speech Rate on Speaker-Specific Processing in English Stop Voicing Perception.
Connie Ting, Yoonjung Kang
PMID 37555541WHAT IT FOUND
North American English listeners did not use a speaker’s habitual speech rate to judge whether English stops were /p/ or /b/.
Across three experiments, fast and slow dialogue rate produced no systematic difference in stop perception.
Key findings
01The habitual speech rate of a speaker in a dialogue did not systematically change listeners’ perception of English stop voicing.
02Listeners’ responses followed the duration of the stop’s aspiration, with longer VOT producing more /p/ responses.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were online native English speakers who reported normal speech, hearing, and vision, so the study does not describe patients or clinical speech perception. The final analysis included 448 listeners after 69 participants were excluded for the attention check and 67 were excluded for not showing the expected VOT effect. The rate manipulation was 15% shorter and 10% longer than the average natural speech rate, and the authors note the result is limited to that range. The dialogue was scripted to avoid stressed syllable-initial voiceless stops, so it did not contain all contexts where VOT would normally vary with speech rate. The identification task used only one word pair, /pi/ and /bi/, and the vowel duration was kept constant across speakers. The main result is null, and the post hoc order effects were marginal and inconsistent across experiments.
Declared interests
The authors disclosed financial support from the University of Toronto Scarborough Research Competitiveness Fund and SSHRC #435-2020-0209. The named funder was an SSHRC Insight Grant.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that habitual speech rate never affects speech perception. The null result applies only to English stop voicing in this online dialogue task with the specific rate manipulation used, and the authors state that the result is limited to that manipulation.