Do effects of habitual speech rate normalization on perception extend to self?

Listeners are known to use contextual speech rate in processing temporally ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, a fast adjacent speech context makes a vowel sound relatively long, whereas a slow context makes it sound relatively short (Reinisch & Sjerps, 2013). Besides the local contextual speech rate, listeners also track talker-specific habitual speech rates (Reinisch, 2016; Maslowski et al., in press). However, effects of one’s own speech rate on the perception of another talker’s speech are yet unexplored. Such effects are potentially important, given that, in dialogue, a listener’s own speech often constitutes the context for the interlocutor’s speech. Three experiments tested the contribution of self-produced speech on perception of the habitual speech rate of another talker. In Experiment 1, one group of participants was instructed to speak fast (high-rate group), whereas another group had to speak slowly (low-rate group; 16 participants per group). The two groups were compared on their perception of ambiguous Dutch /A/-/a:/ vowels embedded in neutral rate speech from another talker. In Experiment 2, the same participants listened to playback of their own speech, whilst evaluating target vowels in neutral rate speech as before. Neither of these experiments provided support for the involvement of self-produced speech in perception of another talker's speech rate. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with a new participant sample, who did not know the participants from the previous two experiments. Here, a group effect was found on perception of the neutral rate talker. This result replicates the finding of Maslowski et al. that habitual speech rates are perceived relative to each other (i.e., neutral rate sounds fast in the presence of a slower talker and vice versa), with naturally produced speech. Taken together, the findings show that self-produced speech is processed differently from speech produced by others. They carry implications for our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in rate-dependent speech perception and the link between production and perception in dialogue settings