Speech Production and Perception: Speaker-Specific Behavior

Speakers show phonetic differences while producing the very same utterance. These speaker-specific differences occur at various linguistic levels and they can be realized phonetically by many parameters such as voice quality, speech rate, loudness, fundamental frequency, breathing, articulatory behavior, etc. At the same time, listeners can vary in the way they exploit such cues for the purpose of speech perception and understanding. Speaker-specific behavior has long been regarded irrelevant for linguistic theories and is generally treated as noise in the data. Methodologically, speaker-specific variation has often been ignored in the statistical modelling of speech production and perception data. However, there are numerous recent studies showing that speaker-specific variation allows for new insights into learning processes, speech planning and speech motor control strategies, processing of linguistic and paralinguistic information, among others. In this book, we seek to link findings from different disciplines by asking the following questions: - Which speaker-specific behaviors are crucial for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying speech production and perception and which are less important? What can it tell us? Why? - Does information about the speaker help listeners to extract meaning? - Do physical and cognitive differences among individuals matter for native language acquisition? - How do we deal with speaker-specific behavior statistically? The invited international scholars have been chosen to address these issues in the book