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Effects of low-pass filtering on dialect and gender perception
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Abstract:
In addition to linguistic (message-related) information, spoken language includes indexical information related to the speaker characteristics (e.g., gender, social status, regional identity). This study is an extension of Jacewicz et al. (2015, JASA, 137: 2417-2418) which demonstrated that listeners were quite accurate in making decisions regarding the regional dialect and gender of a speaker when responding to short unprocessed phrases from 40 speakers (male and female) from two different dialects spoken in central Ohio and western North Carolina. However, when the signal was low-pass filtered at 400 Hz, sensitivity to dialect dropped significantly. The current study examined performance on the same phrases when the signal was low-pass filtered at progressively higher cutoff frequencies (500, 700, 900 and 1100 Hz) to determine how a series of progressively higher filters influence listeners’ perception of talker dialect and sex (Aim 1). In addition, intelligibility of the filtered speech was assessed to determine the optimal filter for removing the semantic content while retaining most of the indexical information (Aim 2). The stimuli were played to 20 listeners (10 male, 10 female) who identified the sex and dialect of the speaker. Listeners were more sensitive to dialect in response to male speech than to female speech. The male talker advantage was manifested predominantly at the two lowest filter cut-offs of 500 Hz and 700 Hz, whereas dialect sensitivity was greatest for female speech at filter cut-off of 900 Hz. Thus, compared with males, there was a 200-Hz upward shift in improved sensitivity to dialect features for females. Intelligibility results further supported the discrepancy. For male speech, the 700 Hz band is the optimal filter for removing the semantic content while retaining most of the dialect-related cues whereas female speech requires a higher filter, about 900 Hz. ; Ohio State Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Grant ; No embargo ; Academic Major: Speech and Hearing Science
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Keyword:
Dialect; Gender; Low-pass
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1811/76778
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