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IS-MOBIL-Mobilitetsprogr.f.utl.Ph.D-stu

The Pitch You Keep Missing: Listener type effects in speech production and perception

Tildelt: kr 25 000

"That's not what it sounded like to me." - We have probably all used this sentence in some context. But can we really disagree about what we hear? Can some of us perceive an attitude in the voice or a meaningful accent on a word that is just not there for other listeners? Why are some people sensitive to the mood in the speaker's voice while others do not seem to notice? How do we decide that some voices are unpleasant? During the U.S. presidential election campaign, some communication experts criticized Sarah Palin for 'sounding fake' while others praised the rhythm and tempo of her public speeches. Some got carried away by the depth and timbre in Barack Obama's prolonged vowels while others could not care less. Is it a coincidence? In fact, it turns out that our perception of sound can be truly subjective. Recent psychoacoustic research of the human auditory system shows that listeners disagree because they perceive different sound components as prominent. Given that linguistically, these components - especially, tone - function as the indicator of prominence, utterance type, speaker attitude and, in many languages, word meaning, an analysis of the effects of individual auditory abilities is long overdue. Apart from obvious implications for speech an d communication research, by comparing speaker samples from tonal and non-tonal languages, we may be able to solve the long-standing typological puzzle of why languages exploit tone in different ways. In my project, I will develop a perceptual method for listener type identification and explore the manifestations of listener type in speech imitation tasks. The purpose of these experiments will be to establish a relation between types of auditory perception and the production of tone. The methodology will be used in a series of comparative studies with population samples from Dutch and Norwegian, to test for a relationship between language type and individual auditory traits.

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IS-MOBIL-Mobilitetsprogr.f.utl.Ph.D-stu