The Less Meaningful the Understanding, the Faster the Feeling: Speech Comprehension Changes Perceptual Speech Tempo

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Perception
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Speech tempo perception is influenced by acoustic cues and listener's cognitive state.
• The impact of speech comprehension on tempo perception remains under-researched.
• Understanding this relationship is crucial for explaining variations in speech processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how speech comprehension affects the perception of speech tempo.
• To differentiate the effects of comprehension on explicit and implicit tempo judgments.
• To explore these effects in native and non-native language speakers.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments manipulated linguistic structures to vary sentence comprehensibility.
• Perceptual speech tempo was measured using explicit and implicit tasks.
• Drift-diffusion modeling was employed to analyze response patterns.

Main Results:

• Listeners overestimated the tempo of less comprehensible speech, an effect reduced by exposure.
• Implicit tempo tasks confirmed findings from explicit tasks.
• Non-native Chinese speakers did not show the same tempo perception differences as native speakers.

Conclusions:

• Speech comprehension significantly modulates the perception of speech tempo.
• The relationship between comprehension and tempo perception differs between native and non-native speakers.
• Cognitive factors, beyond acoustics, play a key role in speech tempo perception.