Skip to main content

Cathi Best

Followers

51

Following

5

Public Views

The University of Texas at Austin

Ioannis Ntzoufras

Athens University of Economics and Business

Joaquim Llisterri

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

T. Florian Jaeger

University of Rochester

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Martin Haspelmath

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

José Francisco Pessanha

UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Rio de Janeiro State University

Waldemar Ferreira Netto

Universidade de São Paulo

Pedro Martín Butragueño

El Colegio de México

Yogendra Chaubey

Concordia University (Canada)

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Cathi Best

Effects of phonological and phonetic factors on cross-language perception of approximants

Journal of Phonetics

... respect to their phonemic status in Japanese, as well as in the phonetic details of ... on th... more

Three-dimensional printable ultrasound transducer stabilization system

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

When using ultrasound imaging of the tongue for speech recording/research, submental transducer s... more When using ultrasound imaging of the tongue for speech recording/research, submental transducer stabilization is required to prevent the ultrasound transducer from translating or rotating in relation to the tongue. An iterative prototype of a lightweight three-dimensional-printable wearable ultrasound transducer stabilization system that allows flexible jaw motion and free head movement is presented. The system is completely non-metallic, eliminating interference with corecorded signals, thus permitting co-collection and co-registration with articulometry systems. A motion study of the final version demonstrates that transducer rotation is limited to 1.25 and translation to 2.5 mmwell within accepted tolerances.

Perceptual evidence of modern Greek voiced stops as phonological categories

Interspeech, 2008

... Mark Antoniou 1 , Catherine T. Best 1,2 , Michael D. Tyler 1 1 MARCS Auditory Laboratories, U... more

Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities

The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC)

Proceedings of the 13th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 14 16 December 2010 Melbourne Australia, 2015

Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and te... more Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and technology experts from across Australia have joined forces to organise the recording of audiovisual (AV) speech data from representative speakers of Australian English in all capital cities and some regional centres. The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC) will provide a standard recording setup and a collaboratively-designed elicitation protocol to create a corpus of AV speech data incorporating annotations and metadata, accessible via a centralised storage facility. The Big ASC infrastructure will provide a significant boost to research in speech science and human communication in Australia.

Cross-language perception of nonnative vowels: Phonological and phonetic effects of listeners' native languages

Several theoretical models predict that nonnative speech discrimination depends on phonetic fit a... more

A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus

Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Hcsnet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus Mustering Languages University of New South Wales 4 5 December 2008, 2015

Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners' native prosodic categories : the role of phonetic properties

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2015

... The findings support a new extension of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best 1995) to... more

The assimilation of L2 australian English vowels to L1 Japanese vowel categories: vocabulary size matters

Interspeech, 2008

Do English speakers assimilate Mandarin tones to English prosodic categories?

Interspeech, 2008

Relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l

ABSTRACT Variation in the production of English /l/ has received significant study. It has been c... more ABSTRACT Variation in the production of English /l/ has received significant study. It has been characterized in terms of categorical allophones, in terms of acoustic properties, and in terms of articulatory timing. Using a parallel corpus of acoustic-articulatory data from two speakers of American English, this study looks at the relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l/ across words in corpus of read speech. We find significant negative correlations between F1 and tongue tip height and significant positive correlations between F2 and tongue body retraction. Additionally, we find that the relative timing of tongue tip and tongue back gestures in our data are consistent with past work on positional variants of /l/.

Effects of non-native dialects on spoken word recognition

Interspeech 2007 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Antwerp Belgium August 27 31, 2015

ABSTRACT

Now you see it, now you don’t - frequency distribution of articulatory information reflected in speech face motion

Accent on language development : using dialects to trace how children come to recognise spoken words

Psychology, 2015

Six- and twelve-month-olds' discrimination of native versus non-native between- and within-organ fricative place contrasts

Interspeech, 2008

The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-langua... more The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171-204). Baltimore, MD: York Press.) accounts for developmental patterns of speech contrast discrimination by proposing that infants shift from untuned phonetic perception at 6 months to natively tuned perceptual assimilation at 11-12 months, but the model does not predict initial discrimination differences among contrasts. To address that issue, we evaluated the Articulatory Organ Hypothesis, which posits that consonants produced using different articulatory organs are initially easier to discriminate than those produced with the same articulatory organ. We tested English-learning 6-and 11-month-olds' discrimination of voiceless fricative place contrasts from Nuu-Chah-Nulth (nonnative) and English (native), with one within-organ and one between-organ contrast from each language. Both native and non-native contrasts were discriminated across age, suggesting that articulatory-organ differences do not influence perception of speech contrasts by young infants. The results highlight the fact that a decline in discrimination for non-native contrasts does not always occur over age.

Uluzuzulalia : a performance and playground of the voice for children and their adults

Your Vivacious Voice, 2015

Nonnative and second-language speech perception

Language Learning & Language Teaching, 2007

Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H., & Best, C. T. (2006). Introduction. In Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H., & Best, C. T. (Eds.) Laboratory Phonology 8: Varieties of Phonological Competence, pp. ix-xiii. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter

Super-imposing maxillary and palatal locations for electroarticulometry: A SIMPLE methoda)

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015

This study proposes a method of superimposing a physical palatal profile, extracted from a speake... more This study proposes a method of superimposing a physical palatal profile, extracted from a speaker's maxillary impression, onto real-time mid-sagittal articulatory data. A palatal/dental profile is first obtained by three-dimensional-scanning the maxillary impression of the speaker. Then a high resolution mid-sagittal palatal line, extracted from the profile, is subdivided into articulatory zones and superimposed, by Iterative Closest Point algorithm, onto reconstructed palatal traces in electromagnetic articulometric (EMA) data. Evaluations were carried out by comparing consonant targets elicited by EMA with the proposed method and by static palatography. The proposed method yields accurate results, as supported by palatography.

Best, C. T. (in press, 10/2013). Devil or angel in the details? Complementary principles of phonetic variation provide the key to phonological structure. In J. Romero & M. Riera (Eds.) Sounds, representations and methodologies: Essays on the phonetics-phonology interface. Current Issues in Lingui...

Perceptual attunement to native speech begins early in life, and becomes the foundation for adult... more Perceptual attunement to native speech begins early in life, and becomes the foundation for adults’ rapid, accurate processing of native words and phrases. At the same time, native attunement imposes constraints on perception of many, though far from all, consonant and vowel contrasts that are irrelevant to native lexical distinctions. What is less understood is how both sides of native listening take account of the natural phonetic variability inherent in spoken languages. To recognize a given phonetic pattern as a token of a particular word, listeners must be able to “read” which phonetic details are lexically relevant, versus which details provide indexical information, e.g., indices such as talker identity, age, gender, mood, speaking style, regional/foreign accent. Perceivers cannot sort this out this by filtering or normalizing phonetic variation. They must instead exploit it as systematic evidence that differentiates the words being said from who is saying them under what con...

Effects of phonological and phonetic factors on cross-language perception of approximants

Journal of Phonetics

... respect to their phonemic status in Japanese, as well as in the phonetic details of ... on th... more

Three-dimensional printable ultrasound transducer stabilization system

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

When using ultrasound imaging of the tongue for speech recording/research, submental transducer s... more When using ultrasound imaging of the tongue for speech recording/research, submental transducer stabilization is required to prevent the ultrasound transducer from translating or rotating in relation to the tongue. An iterative prototype of a lightweight three-dimensional-printable wearable ultrasound transducer stabilization system that allows flexible jaw motion and free head movement is presented. The system is completely non-metallic, eliminating interference with corecorded signals, thus permitting co-collection and co-registration with articulometry systems. A motion study of the final version demonstrates that transducer rotation is limited to 1.25 and translation to 2.5 mmwell within accepted tolerances.

Perceptual evidence of modern Greek voiced stops as phonological categories

Interspeech, 2008

... Mark Antoniou 1 , Catherine T. Best 1,2 , Michael D. Tyler 1 1 MARCS Auditory Laboratories, U... more

Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities

The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC)

Proceedings of the 13th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology 14 16 December 2010 Melbourne Australia, 2015

Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and te... more Under an ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant, speech science and technology experts from across Australia have joined forces to organise the recording of audiovisual (AV) speech data from representative speakers of Australian English in all capital cities and some regional centres. The Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC) will provide a standard recording setup and a collaboratively-designed elicitation protocol to create a corpus of AV speech data incorporating annotations and metadata, accessible via a centralised storage facility. The Big ASC infrastructure will provide a significant boost to research in speech science and human communication in Australia.

Cross-language perception of nonnative vowels: Phonological and phonetic effects of listeners' native languages

Several theoretical models predict that nonnative speech discrimination depends on phonetic fit a... more

A blueprint for a comprehensive Australian English auditory-visual speech corpus

Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Hcsnet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus Mustering Languages University of New South Wales 4 5 December 2008, 2015

Categorizing Mandarin tones into listeners' native prosodic categories : the role of phonetic properties

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2015

... The findings support a new extension of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best 1995) to... more

The assimilation of L2 australian English vowels to L1 Japanese vowel categories: vocabulary size matters

Interspeech, 2008

Do English speakers assimilate Mandarin tones to English prosodic categories?

Interspeech, 2008

Relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l

ABSTRACT Variation in the production of English /l/ has received significant study. It has been c... more ABSTRACT Variation in the production of English /l/ has received significant study. It has been characterized in terms of categorical allophones, in terms of acoustic properties, and in terms of articulatory timing. Using a parallel corpus of acoustic-articulatory data from two speakers of American English, this study looks at the relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l/ across words in corpus of read speech. We find significant negative correlations between F1 and tongue tip height and significant positive correlations between F2 and tongue body retraction. Additionally, we find that the relative timing of tongue tip and tongue back gestures in our data are consistent with past work on positional variants of /l/.

Effects of non-native dialects on spoken word recognition

Interspeech 2007 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Antwerp Belgium August 27 31, 2015

ABSTRACT

Now you see it, now you don’t - frequency distribution of articulatory information reflected in speech face motion

Accent on language development : using dialects to trace how children come to recognise spoken words

Psychology, 2015

Six- and twelve-month-olds' discrimination of native versus non-native between- and within-organ fricative place contrasts

Interspeech, 2008

The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-langua... more The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171-204). Baltimore, MD: York Press.) accounts for developmental patterns of speech contrast discrimination by proposing that infants shift from untuned phonetic perception at 6 months to natively tuned perceptual assimilation at 11-12 months, but the model does not predict initial discrimination differences among contrasts. To address that issue, we evaluated the Articulatory Organ Hypothesis, which posits that consonants produced using different articulatory organs are initially easier to discriminate than those produced with the same articulatory organ. We tested English-learning 6-and 11-month-olds' discrimination of voiceless fricative place contrasts from Nuu-Chah-Nulth (nonnative) and English (native), with one within-organ and one between-organ contrast from each language. Both native and non-native contrasts were discriminated across age, suggesting that articulatory-organ differences do not influence perception of speech contrasts by young infants. The results highlight the fact that a decline in discrimination for non-native contrasts does not always occur over age.

Uluzuzulalia : a performance and playground of the voice for children and their adults

Your Vivacious Voice, 2015

Nonnative and second-language speech perception

Language Learning & Language Teaching, 2007

Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H., & Best, C. T. (2006). Introduction. In Goldstein, L., Whalen, D. H., & Best, C. T. (Eds.) Laboratory Phonology 8: Varieties of Phonological Competence, pp. ix-xiii. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter

Super-imposing maxillary and palatal locations for electroarticulometry: A SIMPLE methoda)

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015

This study proposes a method of superimposing a physical palatal profile, extracted from a speake... more This study proposes a method of superimposing a physical palatal profile, extracted from a speaker's maxillary impression, onto real-time mid-sagittal articulatory data. A palatal/dental profile is first obtained by three-dimensional-scanning the maxillary impression of the speaker. Then a high resolution mid-sagittal palatal line, extracted from the profile, is subdivided into articulatory zones and superimposed, by Iterative Closest Point algorithm, onto reconstructed palatal traces in electromagnetic articulometric (EMA) data. Evaluations were carried out by comparing consonant targets elicited by EMA with the proposed method and by static palatography. The proposed method yields accurate results, as supported by palatography.

Best, C. T. (in press, 10/2013). Devil or angel in the details? Complementary principles of phonetic variation provide the key to phonological structure. In J. Romero & M. Riera (Eds.) Sounds, representations and methodologies: Essays on the phonetics-phonology interface. Current Issues in Lingui...

Perceptual attunement to native speech begins early in life, and becomes the foundation for adult... more Perceptual attunement to native speech begins early in life, and becomes the foundation for adults’ rapid, accurate processing of native words and phrases. At the same time, native attunement imposes constraints on perception of many, though far from all, consonant and vowel contrasts that are irrelevant to native lexical distinctions. What is less understood is how both sides of native listening take account of the natural phonetic variability inherent in spoken languages. To recognize a given phonetic pattern as a token of a particular word, listeners must be able to “read” which phonetic details are lexically relevant, versus which details provide indexical information, e.g., indices such as talker identity, age, gender, mood, speaking style, regional/foreign accent. Perceivers cannot sort this out this by filtering or normalizing phonetic variation. They must instead exploit it as systematic evidence that differentiates the words being said from who is saying them under what con...