Exam Question Checklist

Exam 1997 Question 2

"A central issue in speech perception is how listeners are able to give a reliable indication of the identity of a phonetic segment despite a great deal of variation caused by speaker, context and listening environment. Describe these three types of variability, giving examples. Discuss what information a listener might use to compensate for such variability."

20 things you should mention:

• Speaker Variability
  • Accent/Idiolect
  • Articulatory preferences
  • Larynx size (sex/age)
  • Vocal tract size (age/height)
• Context variability
  • position in utterance
  • style/pragmatic effects
  • speed/intonation
  • phonetic context/stress context
• Listening environment
  • background noise
  • reverberation
  • telephone channel
• Compensation
  • tuning in to speaker
  • normalisation of vowel space
  • normalisation to Fx range
  • visual cues
  • lexical constraints
  • language constraints/syntax/semantics
  • situational/task/pragmatic constraints
  • auditory processing
  • rule-governed context changes/articulatory constraints