TY - GEN

T1 - Listen, Repeat, Decide: Investigating Pronunciation Variation in Spoken Word Recognition among Russian Speakers

AU - Зубов, Владислав Иванович

AU - Риехакайнен, Елена Игоревна

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Variability is one of the important features of natural speech and a challenge for spoken word recognition models and automatic speech recognition systems. We conducted two preliminary experiments aimed at finding out whether native Russian speakers regard differently certain types of pronunciation variation when the variants are equally possible according to orthoepic norms. In the first experiment, the participants had to repeat the words with three different types of pronunciation variability. In the second experiment, we focused on the assessment of words with variable and only one standard stress. Our results support the hypothesis that listeners pay the most attention to words with variable stress, less to the variability of soft and hard consonants, and even less to the presence / absence of /j/. Assessing the correct pronunciation of words with variable stress takes significantly more time than assessing words which have only one correct pronunciation variant. These preliminary results show that pronunciation variants can provide new evidence on how a listener access the mental lexicon during natural speech processing and chooses among the variants stored in it.

AB - Variability is one of the important features of natural speech and a challenge for spoken word recognition models and automatic speech recognition systems. We conducted two preliminary experiments aimed at finding out whether native Russian speakers regard differently certain types of pronunciation variation when the variants are equally possible according to orthoepic norms. In the first experiment, the participants had to repeat the words with three different types of pronunciation variability. In the second experiment, we focused on the assessment of words with variable and only one standard stress. Our results support the hypothesis that listeners pay the most attention to words with variable stress, less to the variability of soft and hard consonants, and even less to the presence / absence of /j/. Assessing the correct pronunciation of words with variable stress takes significantly more time than assessing words which have only one correct pronunciation variant. These preliminary results show that pronunciation variants can provide new evidence on how a listener access the mental lexicon during natural speech processing and chooses among the variants stored in it.

KW - pronunciation variants

KW - spoken word recognition

KW - Russian

M3 - Conference contribution

SP - 129

EP - 132

BT - Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024

A2 - Zock, Michael

A2 - Chersoni, Emmanuele

A2 - Hsu, Yu-Yin

A2 - De Deyne, Simon

PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

CY - Torino, Italia

Y2 - 20 May 2024

ER -