Carol A Fowler

University of Connecticut | UConn · Department of Psychology

Studies of speech accommodation provide evidence for change in use of language structures beyond the critical/sensitive period. For example, Sancier and Fowler (1997) found changes in the voice-onset-times (VOTs) of both languages of a Portuguese-English bilingual as a function of her language context. Though accommodation has been studied widely w...

The hedge “sufficient” is meant to forestall misunderstanding (Remez & Pardo, 2006). Talkers and listeners do not have to share their dialect, and listeners do not have to detect every phone, even every word, produced by talkers for language to “work” in public use. However, sharing of forms has to be sufficient for the talker’s message to get acro...

I review evidence of three kinds relating to leakages in modularity within language domains and between linguistic and nonlinguistic action. One kind of evidence shows that the form-meaning “rift” in language that enables the important principle of duality of patterning and the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems is bridged in many w...

We review some of the findings of motor system activation and involvement in speech perception. We address the findings in relation to Liberman's motor theory of speech perception and some other more recent proposals that provide an account of those findings. We conclude that although findings show convincingly that motor system activation occurs d...

Conversing with others is a mundane, daily activity of nearly all humans, yet it is an extraordinary feat of social collaboration that depends on cooperation, social learning, and collective coordination across an array of caring relationships. This article briefly considers the cooperative and selective nature of language and something of its cont...

The papers in this issue offer valuable perspectives on public language activities as they are embedded in cultural and social contexts. The perspectives are diverse in their theoretical underpinnings, their domains of study, and their methodologies, but they share concerns about action and interaction, learning and the relation of language and cul...

We revisit an article, "Perception of the Speech Code" (PSC), published in this journal 50 years ago (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) and address one of its legacies concerning the status of phonetic segments, which persists in theories of speech today. In the perspective of PSC, segments both exist (in language as known) a...

The sensorimotor model of speech proposed in the target article has considerable value. The Bayesian implementation captures the probabilistic nature of between-person communicative interactions involving speech and the integrality of the speech perception and production systems. In the context of a simulation of between-person communication, this...

A machine that can read printed material to the blind became a priority at the end of World War II with the appointment of a U.S. Government committee to instigate research on sensory aids to improve the lot of blinded veterans. The committee chose Haskins Laboratories to lead a multisite research program. Initially, Haskins researchers overestimat...

Perception of a speech segment changes depending on properties of surrounding segments in a phenomenon called compensation for coarticulation (Mann, 1980). The nature of information that drives these perceptual changes is a matter of debate. One account attributes perceptual shifts to low-level auditory system contrast effects based on static porti...

The main purpose of this article is to consider the significance of different types of memory and non-genetic (‘inclusive’, ‘extended’, ‘soft’) inheritance and different biosemiotic systems for the origin and evolution of language. It presents language and memory as distributed (objectified, external), heteronomous and system-determined processes i...

During a conversation, the durations of spoken words decrease with repeated use, potentially reflecting increased accessibility of information encoded by the words. However, prior research has assessed this shortening only within single settings, despite the fact that conversations may continue across different locales. Importantly, movement throug...

This study examined the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. In the latter group, it also examined the role of the language environment and English proficiency. Three groups of listeners were tested: native English listeners (NE), Mandarin-speaking Chinese listeners in the...

Embedding theories of language production and comprehension in theories of action-perception is realistic and highlights that production and comprehension processes are interleaved. However, layers of internal models that repeatedly predict future linguistic actions and perceptions are implausible. I sketch an ecological alternative whereby perceiv...

We claim that the orthographies of South and Southeast Asia, which are derived from the Brāhmī writing system, are best described by the typological term “āksharik” (/ɑ:kʃərik/), and that they are functionally predominantly alphabetic. We derive these descriptions from the encoding units that went into the design of the orthographies and the decodi...

Nonspeech materials are widely used to identify basic mechanisms underlying speech perception. For instance, they have been used to examine the origin of compensation for coarticulation, the observation that listeners' categorization of phonetic segments depends on neighboring segments (Mann, 1980). Specifically, nonspeech precursors matched to cri...

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000)

We introduce the second of 2 special issues of Ecological Psychology that present papers from a conference, “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter)action,” held at Gordon College in June 2009. The articles in this issue situate the study of language use in two kinds of context that are central to an understanding of “languaging” activities in...

We tested the hypothesis that rapid shadowers imitate the articulatory gestures that structure acoustic speech signals-not just acoustic patterns in the signals themselves-overcoming highly practiced motor routines and phonological conditioning in the process. In a first experiment, acoustic evidence indicated that participants reproduced allophoni...

In introducing the articles of this special issue on language, which grew out of the conference "Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter) Action," we take the opportunity to reflect on fundamental aspects of speaking and listening to others that are often overlooked. The act of conversing is marked by context sensitivity, interdependency, impre...

The study investigated the articulatory basis of locus equations, regression lines relating F2 at the start of a Consonant-Vowel (CV) transition to F2 at the middle of the vowel, with C fixed and V varying. Several studies have shown that consonants of different places of articulation have locus equation slopes that descend from labial to velar to...

Language use has a public face that is as important to study as the private faces under intensive psycholinguistic study. In the domain of phonology, public use of speech must meet an interpersonal "parity" constraint if it is to serve to communicate. That is, spoken language forms must reliably be identified by listeners. To that end, language for...

According to one approach to speech perception, listeners perceive speech by applying general pattern matching mechanisms to the acoustic signal (e.g., Diehl, Lotto, & Holt, 2004). An alternative is that listeners perceive the phonetic gestures that structured the acoustic signal (e.g., Fowler, 1986). The two accounts have offered different explana...

English exhibits compensatory shortening, whereby a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable is measured to be shorter than the same stressed syllable alone. This anticipatory shortening is much greater than backward shortening, whereby an unstressed syllable is measured to shorten a following stressed syllable. We speculated that measu...

I suggest four grounds on which an argument can be made that phonological language forms are not merely emergent properties of the public language use of members of a language community. They are: 1) the existence of spontaneous errors of speech production in which whole consonants or vowels misorder or are replaced; 2) the necessary existence of l...

A theory of speech production provides an account of the means by which a planned sequence of language forms is implemented as vocal tract activity that gives rise to an audible, intelligible acoustic speech signal. Such an account must address several issues. Two central issues are considered in this article. One issue concerns the nature of langu...

Kerzel and Bekkering (2000) found perceptuomotor compatibility effects between spoken syllables and visible speech gestures and interpreted them as evidence in favor of the distinctive claim of the motor theory of speech perception that the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We present three experiments aimed at testing this interpret...

Recent work in embodied cognition has demonstrated that language comprehension involves the motor system (e.g., Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). Such findings are often attributed to mechanisms involving simulations of linguistically described events (Barsalou, 1999; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008). We propose that research paradigms in which simulation is the ce...

Vocal tract gestures for adjacent phones overlap temporally, rendering the acoustic speech signal highly context dependent. For example, following a segment with an anterior place of articulation, a posterior segment's place of articulation is pulled frontward, and listeners' category boundaries shift appropriately. Some theories assume that listen...

We examined the voice onset times (VOTs) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French to address the question whether cross language phonetic influences occur particularly in simultaneous bilinguals (that is, speakers who learned both languages from birth). Speakers produced sentences in which there were target words with initial /p/...

Our research addresses two main questions. First, among phonetic categories that correspond, but are not identical, in the two languages of native bilingual speakers, are there cross-language influences on speech production? Specifically, are the voiceless voice-onset times (VOTs) of bilingual speakers of English and French in Montreal longer in th...

Massaro and Chen (2008) offer a commentary ostensibly on a recent article by Galantucci, Fowler, and Turvey (2006). Our article provided an evaluation of Alvin Liberman’s motor theory of speech perception. We considered it timely to evaluate the motor theory’s different claims, and we hoped to understand why the theory has been better received outs...

Over the last three decades, two major theoretical developments within cognitive science have enriched our understanding of perceptual function and coordinated action in real-world environments.

Cooperative conversation has been shown to foster interpersonal postural coordination. The authors investigated whether such coordination is mediated by the influence of articulation on postural sway. In Experiment 1, talkers produced words in synchrony or in alternation, as the authors varied speaking rate and word similarity. Greater shared postu...

More than 50 years after the appearance of the motor theory of speech perception, it is timely to evaluate its three main claims that (1) speech processing is special, (2) perceiving speech is perceiving gestures, and (3) the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We argue that to the extent that it can be evaluated, the first claim is li...

Reports of sex differences in language processing are inconsistent and are thought to vary by task type and difficulty. In two experiments, we investigated a sex difference in visual influence onheard speech (the McGurk effect). First, incongruent consonant-vowel stimuli were presented where the visual portion of the signal was brief (100 msec) or...

There is evidence of voice onset drift when bilinguals are submerged in cultures that are dominated by their second language (L2). Sancier and Fowler [Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English,‘‘ J. Phonet. 4, 421‐436 (1997)] found that voiceless stop voice onset times (VOTs) of a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portu...

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that serve as cons...

This article reports three experiments designed to explore the basis for speech perceivers' apparent compensations for coarticulation. In the first experiment, the stimuli were members of three /da/-to-/ga/ continua hybridized from natural speech. The monosyllables had originally been produced in disyllables /ada/ and /aga/ to make Continuum 1, /al...

High-functioning autistic children often behave as if they fail to integrate information or seek out coherence. In this article we present a social-pragmatic account of this impairment, in which we propose that social and linguistic deficits tend to isolate autistic children from the experiences that promote the integration of information by other...

A speaker produced schwa-CV disyllables in which consonants were low or high in coarticulation resistance. Articulatory and acoustic measurements verified that the magnitude, but not the extent, of anticipatory coarticulation from the stressed vowel to the schwa was modulated by coarticulation resistance. In a perception experiment, listeners heard...

Imitation of shadowed words was evaluated using Goldinger's (1998) AXB paradigm. The first experiment was a replication of Goldinger's experiments with different tokens. Experiment 1's AXB tests showed that shadowed words were judged to be better imitations of target words than were baseline (read) counterparts more often than chance (.50). Order o...

Participants took part in two speech tests. In both tests, a model speaker produced vowel-consonant-vowels (VCVs) in which the initial vowel varied unpredictably in duration. In the simple response task, participants shadowed the initial vowel; when the model shifted to production of any of three CVs (/pa/, /ta/ or /ka/), participants produced a CV...

The chapter reviews past and current theorizing and research in four related domains: phonological competence, phonological planning for speech production, speech production itself, and speech perception. Research and theorizing in these domains is conducted, for the most part, independently. However, in the chapter, I link the domains by means of...

The research was designed to evaluate interpersonal coordination during conversation with a new measurement tool. The experiment uses an analysis based on recurrence strategies, known as cross recurrence quantification, to evaluate the shared activity between 2 postural time series in reconstructed phase space. Pairs of participants were found to s...

Speakers imitate the speech they shadow. However, speech is not wholly imitative; speakers use their own speech habits or language knowledge in shadowing as well. We examined the interplay between the effects of input variables and of knowledge of the language on shadowing. We asked speakers to shadow utterances composed of phonetic sequences that...

Visual information about speech influences speech perception, leading to better perception in noise and to illusions such as the McGurk effect. Here, the question was addressed of whether visual influences would be greater with a three‐dimensional visual speaker [the patented Life Imaging Projection System (L.I.P.S.)] than the two‐dimensional one....

Memorializes Alvin M. Liberman, known for his work in the field of speech perception. He was a pioneer in the experimental study of speech, and he contributed a widely cited motor theory of speech perception. His early research on the failure to accurately perceive words presented in acoustic alphabets led to the discovery that speech is not compos...

Memorializes Alvin M. Liberman, known for his work in the field of speech perception. He was a pioneer in the experimental study of speech, and he contributed a widely cited motor theory of speech perception. His early research on the failure to accurately perceive words presented in acoustic alphabets led to the discovery that speech is not compos...

The claim that perception and action are commonly coded because they are indistinguishable at the distal level is crucial for theories of cognition. However, the consequences of this claim run deep, and the Theory of Event Coding (TEC) is not up to the challenge it poses. We illustrate why through a brief review of the evidence that led to the moto...

According to the motor and direct realist theories, listeners perceive speech gestures. The following experiments test this claim. Experiments 1 and 2 replicate the findings of Porter and Castellanos [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 1349?1356 (1980)]. Participants shadowed vowel?consonant?vowels (VCVs) produced by a model. Responses were timed. The differe...

Early in his career, Alvin Liberman obtained experimental findings that he describes in his book, Speech : A Special Code, as ‘‘an epiphany.’’ The findings revealed that listeners track speakers’ articulations. From these findings and subsequent others, Liberman developed his motor theory of speech perception. In addition, however, he set out to un...

This landmark study examines the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought. Leading scholars, including psychologists, linguists and anthropologists, offer state-of-the-art analyses to demonstrate that gestures are not merely an embellishment of speech but are integral parts of language itself. Language and Gesture offers a wide range of t...

These experiments explored the claim by A. Lotto and K. Kluender (1998) that frequency contrast explains listeners' compensations for coarticulation in the case of liquid consonants coarticulating with following stops. Evidence of frequency contrast in experiments that tested for it directly was not found, but Lotto and Kluender's finding that high...

The present description of the Merge model addresses only auditory, not audiovisual, speech perception. However, recent findings in the audiovisual domain are relevant to the model. We outline a test that we are conducting of the adequacy of Merge, modified to accept visual information about articulation.

Linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract play an important role in speech perception and production. Imitation of speech across conversational partners is a natural consequence of the close connection between perception and production. Following research that finds imitation in single‐word shadowing, this study paired unacquainted sam...

These experiments explored the claim by A. Lotto and K. Kluender (1998) that frequency contrast explains listeners' compensations for coarticulation in the case of liquid consonants coarticulating with following stops. Evidence of frequency contrast in experiments that tested for it directly was not found, but Lotto and Kluender's finding that high...

We explored the variation in the resistance that lingual and nonlingual consonants exhibit to coarticulation by following vowels in the schwa+CV disyllables of two native speakers of English. Generally, lingual consonants other than /g/ were more resistant to coarticulation than the labial consonants /b/ and /v/. Coarticulation resistance in the co...

Three experiments were designed to investigate how listeners to coarticulated speech use the acoustic speech signal during a vowel to extract information about a forthcoming oral or nasal consonant. A first experiment showed that listeners use evidence of nasalization in a vowel as information for a forthcoming nasal consonant. A second and third e...

Much of the work on sound localization has focused on sound sources in the horizontal plane. This study looks at the auditory perception of distance using a reaching task [L. D. Rosenblum, A. P. Wuestefeld, and K. L. Anderson, Ecological Psych. 8, 1–24 (1996)]. In this task, blindfolded participants judged the reachability of a rattle based on a st...

The orderly output constraint (OOC) is extraneous. Talkers “speak in lines” in its absence. Further, there is no perceptual motivation for an OOC; perceivers ignore the linearity between F2 at consonant-vowel onset and F2 in the vowel. In any case, the analogy with bat and barn owl localization systems underlying the theory is extreme, Sussman...

We examined the possible relevance of locus equations to human production and perception of stop consonants. The orderly output constraint (OOC) of Sussman, Frachter, and Cable (1995) claims that humans have evolved to produce speech such thatF2 at consonant release andF2 at vowel midpoint are linearly related for consonants so that developing perc...

We examined the possible relevance of locus equations to human production and perception of stop consonants. The orderly output constraint (OOC) of Sussman, Fruchter, and Cable (1995) claims that humans have evolved to produce speech such that F2 at consonant release and F2 at vowel midpoint are linearly related for consonants so that developing pe...

Coarticulatory acoustic variation is presumed to be caused by temporally overlapping linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract. The complex acoustic consequences of such gestures can be hypothesized to specify them without recourse to context-sensitive representations of phonetic segments. When the consequences of separate gestures con...

We report three experiments exploring the occurrence of perceptually-guided changes in speech production by a speaker well past the critical period for language acquisition. A first experiment shows that listeners sharing our speaker's native language (Brazilian Portuguese) can distinguish her productions in that language as having been produced ei...

We explore how listeners perceive distinct pieces of phonetic information that were conveyed in parallel by the fundamental frequency (fO) contour of spoken and sung vowels. In a first experiment, we measured differences in fO of /i/ and /a/ vowels spoken and sung by unselected undergraduate participants. Differences in "intrinsic fO" (with fO of /...

In discourse, speakers tend to choose lexically short words (e.g., pronouns) when the words’ referents are highly accessible to listeners. However, in narrations of a film, a change in episode between references to a character, even one who should otherwise be accessible to a listener, tends to block use of short expressions. In one investigation o...

Three experiments tested subjects? ability to recognize spoken words based on word?final phonological information. Experiment 1 replicated the finding [A. Salasoo and D. B. Pisoni, J. Memory Lang. 24, 210?231 (1985)] that when presented with phonological information incrementally beginning from word?offset (backward gating), subjects correctly iden...

Coarticulatory acoustic variation is presumed to be caused by temporally overlapping linguistically significant gestures of the vocal tract. The complex acoustic consequences of such gestures can specify them without recourse to context‐sensitive representations of phonetic segments. When the consequences of separate gestures converge on a common a...

Spoken words are easier to identify if they have been heard recently. This phenomenon, known as repetition priming, can be used to investigate the processes underlying word recognition. Using an implicit memory paradigm, this study looked at the effect of changing the voice of the speaker on repetition priming. Voice effects occur if repetition pri...

Recent research suggests that voice information is not discarded during word recognition, but is represented in memory and can serve as a retrieval cue for word recognition. The research reported here asks whether other idiosyncratic aspects of an event in which speech occurs are also retained with speech in memory. Four experiments explored the ef...

Differential hemispheric contributions to the perceptual phenomenon known as the McGurk effect were examined in normal subjects, 1 callosotomy patient, and 4 patients with intractable epilepsy. Twenty-five right-handed subjects were more likely to demonstrate an influence of a mouthed word on identification of a dubbed acoustic word when the speake...

Three experiments follow up on Easton and Basala’s (1982) report that the “McGurk effect” (an influence of a visibly mouthed utterance on a dubbed acoustic one) does not occur when utterances are real words rather than nonsense syllables. In contrast, with real-word stimuli, Easton and Basala report a strong reverse effect whereby a dubbed soundtra...

Three experiments follow up on Easton and Basala's (1982) report that the "McGurk effect" (an influence of a visibly mouthed utterance on a dubbed acoustic one) does not occur when utterances are real words rather than nonsense syllables. In contrast, with real-word stimuli, Easton and Basala report a strong reverse effect whereby a dubbed soundtra...

Two experiments investigate a weakening of supralaryngeal gestures in an utterance, analogous in some ways to declination of fundamental frequency and amplitude. In one experiment, acoustic measures revealed progressive centralization of stressed /i/, /a/ and /u/ left to right in trisyllabic utterances read by Tuscan subjects. A second experiment,...

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Three experiments investigated the "McGurk effect" whereby optically specified syllables experienced synchronously with acoustically specified syllables integrate in perception to determine a listener's auditory perceptual experience. Experiments contrasted the cross-modal effect of orthographic on acoustic syllables presumed to be associated in ex...

The literature on "contrast" provides no evidence that durational contrast should occur in the speech and nonsence signals used in research cited by Diehl et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 2905-2909 (1991)]. Moreover, there is evidence that, in comparable signals, it does not occur. Accordingly, their own account of the collection of findings on rate...

Phonetic segments are coarticulated in speech. Accordingly, the articulatory and acoustic properties of the speech signal during the time frame traditionally identified with a given phoneme are highly context-sensitive. For example, due to carryover coarticulation, the front tongue-tip position for /1/ results in more fronted tongue-body contact fo...

Previous research on stress has focused almost exclusively on articulatory correlates local to a single target syllable within a single articulatory subsystem (e.g., the lip‐jaw or the respiratory system). However, the articulatory correlates of stress are not local in either sense. Although a few studies report remote effects of stress (effects no...

Duplex perception is the simultaneous perception of a speech syllable and of a nonspeech "chirp," and occurs when a single formant transition and the remainder (the "base") of a synthetic syllable are presented to different ears. The current study found a slight but nonsignificant advantage for correct labeling of the fused syllable when the chirp...

The perceptual moment of occurrence of a syllable, its P-center, has frequently been examined by instructing subjects to adjust a series of speech sounds until they sounded isochronous. The present two experiments examined the effect of changing the instructions. In addition to the overall isochrony instructions, we asked subjects to align pairs of...

Suggests that the P-center (psychological moment of occurrence) of a syllable does not correspond to any obvious acoustic marker in the speech signal, nor can it be determined solely with reference to the phonetic composition of syllable. Syllable structure, however, does play a role in explaining this timing phenomenon. It has been well establishe...