Developing a naturalistic approach for an experimental question: Perception of acoustically ambiguous phonemes within semantically disambiguating discourse

Abstract

While acoustic details such as voice onset time can be informative as to the identity of a phoneme (e.g., GOAT versus COAT), these details are not always reliable. Fortunately, disambiguating cues can often be found elsewhere, such as the semantic context. Indeed, acoustically ambiguous phonemes can be perceptually biased toward a semantically congruent percept (e.g., “The girl milked the ?OAT,” resulting in the percept GOAT). However, these findings come from well-controlled studies where participants repeatedly attend to specific contrasts produced in isolated sentences by a hyper-articulate speaker, which may limit generalizability to real-world listening tasks. Therefore, the current project aims to reconsider this research question in a more naturalistic listening scenario. A two-speaker referential communication task was used to elicit English discourse about visual scenes. Subsequently, statements containing critical minimal-pair referents were replaced with experimental trials containing acoustic × semantic manipulations. Participants in the current study will be told to listen to the conversation and show they’re paying attention by clicking referents in the on-screen image. Supposedly, their primary task will be to complete intermittent survey items about the speakers’ social communication. In reality, we will use eyetracking to infer their phonological and lexical processing during the embedded trials.