Description:

Title: The listener as the source of invariance

Abstract: Every time we open our mouths to speak we reveal not only what we are trying to say but also cues to how we are feeling, where we come from, and who we are. Ohala (1981, 2012) proposes a model of speech perception in which listeners initiate sound change through a process of creative misparsing and mishearing of the speech signal to arrive at novel, yet plausible, percepts that might form the basis of a new pattern in the community. Beddor (2009) inverts this proposal to suggest that the same sound changes might emerge through individual differences in listeners' weighting and attribution of coarticulatory cues in the signal. Listeners, Beddor argues, need not be wrong, they need only arrive at functionally-equivalent percepts differently. In this talk I will focus the proposals of Ohala and Beddor, not on sound change, but on one of the core puzzles of speech perception: how do listeners experience so much consistency, so much subjective agreement, from speech signals which are, if anything, defined more by their variation than by their sameness. Using evidence from sociophonetic speech perception research and a recent replication and extension of Strand & Johnson (1996), I will argue that Beddor's (2009) model allows us to view the listener, not just as a source of sound change, but as a source of invariance. Indeed, there seem to be two distinct opportunities for listeners to impose the illusion of sameness upon the subjective experience of speech sounds and both of these can be influenced by social information. The talk will conclude with a consideration of the implications of this proposal for exemplar models and for theories of speech perception more broadly.