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Introduction
Hugo Quené works at the Institute of Language Sciences (ILS) at Utrecht University. Hugo conducts and supervises research in phonetics and in research methods, with a special interest in digital, computational and quantitative methods. He is also founding director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Utrecht University, and he is involved in projects supporting Open Science at Utrecht University.
Additional affiliations
March 1989 - present
Publications
Publications (136)
One of the key questions in linguistics is how language is acquired, both by children and by adults. Language acquisition is often investigated by means of behavioral research methods. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the most important methodological issues involved in designing empirical linguistic studies, and in analyzing da...
This booklet is written as accompaniment to the online tutorial on Statistics with R (Basics), held as part of the workshop on Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research (EMLAR, https://emlar.wp.hum.uu.nl/), Utrecht, on 17 April 2020.
Online version at https://hugoquene.github.io/emlar2020
Source code at https://hdl.handle.net/10411/ZY...
Second language learners may merge similar sounds from their native (L1) and second (L2) languages into a single phonetic category, neutralizing subphonemic differences in these similar sounds. This study investigates whether Dutch speakers produce phonetically distinct variants of /s/ in their L1 Dutch and L2 English, and whether and how this phon...
Men with lower pitched voices tend to be rated as more attractive by female listeners; this tendency has been attributed to female sexual selection. Males not only speak with a lower pitch than females, however, but they also tend to speak at a faster tempo. Therefore, this study investigates whether speech tempo also affects the subjective attract...
The main goal of this paper is to improve our insight in the mental preparation of speech, based on speakers' self-monitoring behavior. To this end we re-analyze the aggregated responses from earlier published experiments eliciting speech sound errors. The re-analyses confirm or show that (1) “early” and “late” detections of elicited speech sound e...
This package contains supplementary materials accompanying Quené & Port (2005) [doi:10.1159/000087222] listed above.
It has been known for a long time and a wide variety of languages that vowel fundamental frequency (F0) following voiceless obstruents tends to be significantly higher than F0 following voiced obstruents. There has been a long-standing debate about the cause of this phenomenon. Some evidence in previous work is more compatible with an articulatory...
Speech sound errors are known to occur more often as the interfering speech sounds are phonetically more similar. This paper aims to test the general hypothesis that the phonetic contrast between interfering speech sounds also mediates the odds of detection and repair of such a speech error. This was investigated by re-analyzing responses from four...
In Table 4, a coefficient of +0.4091 (s.e. 0.1553) was reported for the categorical predictor “Undetected vs Detected”. The contrasts of this predictor were coded as − 1 for undetected speech errors, +0.5 for errors detected early, and +0.5 for errors detected late (p.422). On p.422 it was correctly stated that “[the] significant second contrast co...
Previous studies have well established that certain causal connectives encode information about the semantic-pragmatic distinction between different types of causal relations such as CAUSE-CONSEQUENCE versus CLAIM-ARGUMENT relations. These “specialized” causal connectives assist listeners in discerning different types of causality. Additionally, re...
Prosody carries a variety of information in spoken communication. However, how it is involved in expressing the structure of discourse remains less well understood. This study addressed this issue by investigating the use of prosody in expressing two types of causality: subjective and objective causality. Specifically, we explored the trade-off bet...
Filled pauses are widely considered as a relatively consistent feature of an individual's speech. However, acoustic consistency has only been observed within single-session recordings. By comparing filled pauses in two recordings made >2.5 years apart, this study investigates within-speaker consistency of the vowels in the filled pauses uh and um,...
In Moroccan Dutch, /s/ has been claimed to be pronounced as retracted [s] (towards /ʃ/) in certain consonant clusters. Recently, retracted s-pronunciation has also been attested in endogenous Dutch. We tested empirically whether Moroccan Dutch [s] is indeed more retracted than endogenous Dutch [s] in relevant clusters. Additionally, we tested wheth...
In this paper we attempt to answer the question why in self-monitoring some segmental speech errors are detected in internal, some in external speech, and others not at all. This was done by re-analyzing data obtained in two earlier published SLIP experiments. It is hypothesized that detection of errors that are similar to the correct target takes...
Open textbook, available at https://hugoquene.github.io/QMS-EN, 290+ pp.
Full text in multiple formats, source code, and supplementary materials are available at <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4479620>.
Online open textbook, available at https://hugoquene.github.io/KMS-NL, 290+ pp.
Full text in multiple formats, source code, and supplementary materials are available at <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4113979>.
Cheat Sheet for Quantitative Research (in Linguistics, Psycholinguistics)
If your study has at most two orange cells and no red cell in the table on the right, then proceed with caution. If your study has more than two orange cells or one red cell, go back and reconsider your design and analysis.
Available online at https://www.hugoquene.nl/qm/C...
This paper focuses on the source of self-repairs of segmental speech errors during self-monitoring. A potential source of repairs are candidate forms competing with the form under production. In the time interval between self-monitoring internal and overt speech, activation of competitors probably decreases. From this theory of repairing we derived...
This paper investigates the evaluation of the English sounds /θ/ and /ð/ as produced by European non-native speakers. Using the data from a larger web survey, we compared the error judgements by different native and non-native users of English. This was done to establish whether there is any normative convergence among European non-native speakers,...
The UCU Accent Project was set up in 2010 to collect a wide variety of non-native and native accents of English in an environment where English is the lingua franca, namely an international liberal arts and sciences college in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The recordings were made longitudinally over the three years of undergraduate study, and four c...
The within-word and within-utterance time course of internal and external self-monitoring is investigated in a four-word tongue twister experiment eliciting interactional word initial and word medial segmental errors and their repairs. It is found that detection rate for both internal and external self-monitoring decreases from early to late both w...
Two experiments are reported, eliciting segmental speech errors and self-repairs. Error frequencies, detection frequencies, error-to-cutoff times and cutoff-to-repair times were assessed with and without auditory feedback, for errors against four types of segmental oppositions. Main hypotheses are (a) prearticulatory and postarticulatory detection...
for a revised version, see doi:10.1007/978-981-15-6627-1_9
Disfluencies, such as uh and uhm, are known to help the listener in speech comprehension. For instance, disfluencies may elicit prediction of less accessible referents and may trigger listeners' attention to the following word. However, recent work suggests differential processing of disfluencies in native and non-native speech. The current study i...
Where native speakers supposedly are fluent by default, nonnative speakers often have to strive hard to achieve a nativelike fluency level. However, disfluencies (such as pauses, fillers, repairs, etc.) occur in both native and nonnative speech and it is as yet unclear how fluency raters weigh the fluency characteristics of native and nonnative spe...
Speech comprehension involves extensive use of prediction. Linguistic prediction may be guided by the semantics or syntax, but also by the performance characteristics of the speech signal, such as disfluency. Previous studies have shown that listeners, when presented with the filler uh, exhibit a disfluency bias for discourse-new or unknown referen...
Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, seg...
Does an audible frown or smile affect speech comprehension? Previous research suggests that a spoken word is recognized faster if its audible affect (frown or smile) matches its semantic valence. In the present study, listeners' task was to evaluate the valence of spoken affective sentences. Formants were raised or lowered using LPC to convey an au...
When talkers from various language backgrounds use L2 English as a lingua franca, their accents of English are expected to converge, and talkers' rhythmical patterns are predicted to converge too. Prosodic convergence was studied among talkers who lived in a community where L2 English is used predominantly. Speech rhythm was operationalized here as...
Self-repairs of segmental speech errors come in two varieties: repairs of early and of late-detected errors. Early-detected errors are detected in inner, late-detected errors in overt speech. Late-detected errors are those in which the word or phrase containing the error is completed before the repair is made. We made acoustic measurements of both...
This paper investigates self-monitoring for speech errors by means of consonant identification in speech fragments excised from speech errors and their correct controls, as obtained in earlier experiments eliciting spoonerisms. Upon elicitation, segmental speech errors had been either not detected, or early detected or late detected and repaired by...
Older talkers speak slower than young ones, but speech tempo has increased in the last decades. Have present-day older talkers slowed down with age or have they sped up with their community? This study investigates longitudinal patterns in articulation rate in formal speeches presented annually by Queen Beatrix between her ages 42 and 74. Her tempo...
The oral fluency level of an L2 speaker is often used as a measure in assessing language proficiency. The present study reports on four experiments investigating the contributions of three fluency aspects (pauses, speed and repairs) to perceived fluency. In Experiment 1 untrained raters evaluated the oral fluency of L2 Dutch speakers. Using specifi...
It has been asserted that a common European variety of English is currently emerging. This so-called “European English” is claimed to be the result of convergence among non-native English speakers, and to reflect a gradual abandonment of Inner Circle norms, which are deemed to be increasingly irrelevant to non-native speakers’ communicative needs....
In most collections of segmental speech errors, exchanges are less frequent than anticipations and perseverations. However, it has been suggested that in inner speech exchanges might be more frequent than either anticipations or perseverations, because many half-way repaired errors (Yew…uhh..New York) are classified as repaired anticipations, but m...
Previous reports on the relationship between clear speech acoustic changes and the clear speech intelligibility benefit for vowels have used an "extreme groups" design, comparing talkers who produced a large clear speech benefit to talkers who produced little or no clear speech benefit. In Ferguson and Kewley-Port (2007), 12 talkers from the Fergus...
Motor resonance processes are involved both in language comprehension and in affect perception. Therefore we predict that listeners understand spoken affective words slower, if the phonetic form of a word is incongruent with its affective meaning. A language comprehension study involving an interference paradigm confirmed this prediction. This inte...
Smiling during talking yields speech with higher formants, and hence larger formant dispersion. Previous studies have shown that motor resonance during perception of words related to smiling can activate muscles responsible for the smiling action. If word perception causes smiling activation for such smile-related words, then this motor resonance m...
If English is used intensively as a lingua franca in a multilanguage community, do speakers then converge towards a single common accent? This speech corpus allows for longitudinal study to investigate the question of convergence by means of repeated speech recordings of students at an English-language college over a period of 5 years. We describe...
In native speech, durational patterns convey linguistically relevant phenomena such as phrase structure, lexical stress, rhythm, and word boundaries. The lower intelligibility of non-native speech may be partly due to its deviant durational patterns. The present study aims to quantify the relative contributions of non-native durational patterns and...
Dutch language users can use connective patterns to express backward causal relations. Sub-omdat patterns (omdat, ‘because1’, followed by a subordinated clause) and co-want patterns (want, ‘because2/since/for’, followed by a coordinated clause) can be used in both spoken and written Dutch. However, only in spoken Dutch, a third pattern might be use...
Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Text Structuring 2009
The aim of the present study is to investigate the effects of tempo manipulations in radio commercials, on listeners' evaluation, cognition and persuasion. Questionnaire scores from 131 young and 130 elderly listeners show effects of tempo manipulation on listeners' subjective evaluation, but not on their cognitive scores. Tempo effects on persuasi...
This paper investigates phonological recursion by means of early accent placement (stress shift), which marks the initial boundary of a phonological phrase. The question is whether or not this early pitch accent placement can be applied recursively to phonological phrases that are embedded in larger phonological phrases. This was investigated in a...
Speech impairment often occurs in patients after treatment for head and neck cancer. New treatment modalities such as surgical reconstruction or (chemo)radiation techniques aim at sparing anatomical structures that are correlated with speech and swallowing. In randomized trials investigating efficacy of various treatment modalities or speech rehabi...
Psycholinguistic data are often analyzed with repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA), but this paper argues that mixed-effects (multilevel) models provide a better alternative method. First, models are discussed in which the two random factors of participants and items are crossed, and not nested. Traditional ANOVAs are compared against the...
Subjective speech evaluation is the gold standard to assess speech quality of head and neck cancer patients. This study investigates if conventional acoustic-phonetic and novel feature analysis contribute to the development of a multidimensional speech assessment protocol. Speech recordings of 51 patients 6 months post-treatment and of 18 control s...
This paper reports two experiments designed to investigate whether lexical bias in phonological speech errors is caused by immediate feedback of activation, by self-monitoring of inner speech, or by both. The experiments test a number of predictions derived from a model of self-monitoring of inner speech. This model assumes that, after an error in...
Alaryngeal speakers (speakers in whom the larynx has been removed) have inconsistent control over acoustic parameters such as F(0) and duration. This study investigated whether proficient tracheoesophageal and oesophageal speakers consistently convey phrase boundaries. It was further investigated if these alaryngeal speakers used the same hierarchy...
Speech tempo (articulation rate) varies both between and within speakers. The present study investigates several factors affecting tempo in a corpus of spoken Dutch, consisting of interviews with 160 high-school teachers. Speech tempo was observed for each phrase separately, and analyzed by means of multilevel modeling of the speaker's sex, age, co...
This wide-ranging survey of experimental methods in phonetics and phonology shows the insights and results provided by different methods of investigation, including laboratory-based, statistical, psycholinguistic, computational-modeling, corpus, and field techniques. The five chapters in the first part of the book examine the recent history and int...
This study investigates how listeners cope with gradient forms of deletion of word-final /t/ when recognising words in a phonological context that makes /t/-deletion viable. A corpus study confirmed a high incidence of /t/-deletion in an /st#b/ context in Dutch. A discrimination study showed that differences between released /t/, unreleased /t/ and...
Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with highly regular inter-stress timing. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these regular time points. Better timing regularity should improve spoken-word perception. Previ...
Speech tempo (articulation rate) varies both between and within speakers. The present study investigates several factors affecting tempo in a corpus of spoken Dutch, consisting of interviews with 160 high-school teachers. Speech tempo was observed for each phrase separately, and analyzed by means of multilevel modeling of the speaker’s sex, age, co...
Data from repeated measures experiments are usually analyzed with conventional ANOVA. Three well-known problems with ANOVA are the sphericity assumption, the design effect (sampling hierarchy), and the requirement for complete designs and data sets. This tutorial explains and demonstrates multi-level modeling (MLM) as an alternative analysis tool f...
The present volume commemorates Sieb Nooteboom’s career as a leading phonetician with a collection of short articles by his former and current PhD candidates, his co-workers at the Department of Phonetics at Utrecht University, by other professors of Phonetics (or equivalent) in the Netherlands and by colleagues from abroad who in one way or anothe...
The rate or tempo of speech modulates listeners’ phonetic expectations, e.g., about VOT or about segment durations. In addition, variations in tempo contribute directly to speech communication, e.g., by expressing the communicative importance of speech fragments. It is not clear, however, how large tempo differences in speech have to be in order to...
Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with a clear speech rhythm. Salient, stressed vowels are aligned to rhythmic points within the phrase period. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory; M.R. Jones (1976), Psych. Rev. 83, 323--355) is that listeners attend in particular to...
ngen. ShortList gebruikt fonemen als invoer-representatie; deze zouden bv ontleend kunnen zijn aan de voorafgaande foneemperceptie. In diezelfde bijeenkomst (6 november) kijken we ook naar woordherkenning in verbonden spraak. De klankvorm van een woord is soms sterk geassimileerd aan zijn klank-omgeving, waardoor het woord wellicht moeilijker 1 her...
In this study we investigate whether speakers, in line with the predictions of the Hyper- and Hypospeech theory, speed up most during the least informative parts and less during the more informative parts, when they are asked to speak faster. We expected listeners to benefit from these changes in timing, and our main goal was to find out whether ma...
Cross-modal semantic priming with partial auditory primes seems a good technique to assess spoken-word recognition, because it allows tracing the activation of multiple word candidates. However, previous research using this technique has found inconsistent results. First, a priming experiment is reported that addresses this technique's validity. Re...
Statistical analyses in psycholinguistics are often done by two separate ANOVAs for repeated measures, over subjects and over items. Multi-level modeling (MLM), by contrast, combines all random factors, subjects and items and any others, into a single full analysis. This property alone makes multi-level modeling superior over conventional single-le...
Highly proficient alaryngeal speakers are known to convey prosody successfully. The present study investigated whether alaryngeal speakers not selected on grounds of proficiency were able to convey pitch accent (a pitch accent is realized on the word that is in focus, cf. Bolinger, 1958). The participating speakers (10 tracheoesophageal, 9 esophage...
If speakers repeat a phrase, their speech tends to be highly rhythmical. In a similar task without repetition , no such rhythmicity was found. This study investigates whether stress predictability, varied between tasks, affects speech rhythm. Results show that a regular speech rhythm emerges in repeated phrases (with highly predictable stress patte...
In phrases such as THIRteen MEN, stress in the first word is shifted forward from its canonical word-final position. Our general hypothesis is that this stress shift is controlled in part by the global rhythmical pattern of the utterance, informally defined as a Rhythmic Constraint on onset times of stressed vowels, in real time. This hypothesis yi...
In phrases like thirteen men, stress in thirteen is often shifted forward from its canonical final position. Presumably, the occurrence of this optional stress shift may be partly controlled by the rhythm of speech. Work on rhythmic speech production has demonstrated that given a repetition cycle, T, its harmonic fractions like T/2 attract stressed...
Certain applications, e.g., voicemail playback or text read‐out, time‐compress their output speech, usually in a linear fashion. This paper compares spoken‐word perception, as measured by phoneme monitoring, in natural fast‐rate speech and in normal‐rate speech that is linearly time‐compressed to the same fast rate. Perception is predicted to be mo...
Speakers vary their speech tempo (speaking rate), and such variations in tempo are quite noticeable. But what is the just noticeable difference (JND) for tempo in speech? The present study aims at providing a realistic and robust estimate, by using multiple speech tokens from multiple speakers. The JND is assessed in two (2IAX and 2IFC) comparison...
Crossmodal semantic priming is often considered to be a valid technique for measuring the activation of multiple word candidates, particularly if used with auditory prime words cut off before their offset. In previous studies, the technique has been used to show that the activation of multiple candidates is modulated by preceding context. However,...
Even when words are normally assimilated in connected speech, listeners can recognise them easily. Word recognition may be so robust against assimilation, because listeners expect certain assimilation phenomena (given speech rate and style). From this hypothesis, we predict that listeners have more difficulty in recognising (unexpectedly) un-assimi...
Words in connected speech are often assimilated to subsequent words. Some property of that upcoming word may then be determined in advance; these advance assimilatory cues may facilitate perception of that word. A gating experiment was conducted in Dutch, studying anticipatory voice assimilation between plosives, in 24 two-word combinations. In Dut...
Previous experiments using a word-spotting task suggest that English listeners use metrically strong syllables to segment continuous speech into discrete words (Cutler & Norris, 1988). The present study is concerned with this metrical segmentation strategy in Dutch. Although Dutch and English share general metrical properties, they differ in ways t...
This study investigates whether subjects use a strategy of word
recognition in a rhyme-monitoring task. Results suggest that this is
indeed the case. In addition, however, the task introduces an effect of
phonological priming of the cue word
This paper investigates the relative contributions of accentuation and of durational word boundary cues to listeners' perceived word segmentation in Dutch. A listening experiment is reported, in which 36 two-word phrases with an ambiguous word boundary were used as stimuli. Four groups of 20 subjects each had to make a forced binary choice between...
Investigated the contribution of acoustic-phonetic word boundary markers to perceived word segmentation in 37 native Dutch Ss. In Exp 1, phonetically ambiguous word combinations were presented; linguistic and contextual information could not contribute to word segmentation of these stimuli. Yet, the observed 80% accuracy shows that phonetic boundar...
Suprasegmental phenomena in synthetic speech should reflect the linguistic structure of the input text. An algorithm is described, which establishes the prosodic sentence structure (PSS). This can be achieved without exhaustive syntactic parsing, using a dictionary of 550 function words. Subsequently, phrase and accent locations are derived from th...
Text-to-speech systems generally consist of two components. The first one converts the input text to an abstract, linguistically relevant, representation. Usually, this is a phoneme representation of the input text, with markers for (word, morpheme, syllable) boundaries, word stress, and sentence accent. The second component converts this transcrip...