Department of Human Science/Research Center for Applied Perceptual Science, Kyushu University, 4-9-1 Shiobaru, Minami-ku, Fukuoka, 815-8540, Japan.
Institut für Psychologie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Alexanderstraße 10, D-64283, Darmstadt, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2017 May 11;7(1):1782. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-01831-z.
A set of experiments was performed to make a cross-language comparison of intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech, employing a total of 117 native listeners of English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. The experiments enabled to examine whether the languages of three types of timing-stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed languages-exhibit different trends in intelligibility, depending on the duration of the segments that were temporally reversed. The results showed a strikingly similar trend across languages, especially when the time axis of segment duration was normalised with respect to the deviation of a talker's speech rate from the average in each language. This similarity is somewhat surprising given the systematic differences in vocalic proportions characterising the languages studied which had been shown in previous research and were largely replicated with the present speech material. These findings suggest that a universal temporal window shorter than 20-40 ms plays a crucial role in perceiving locally time-reversed speech by working as a buffer in which temporal reorganisation can take place with regard to lexical and semantic processing.
进行了一系列实验，以对本地时间反转语音的可理解度进行跨语言比较，共有 117 名英语、德语、日语和普通话母语者参与了实验。这些实验能够检验三种类型的具有时间压力的语言、音节计时语言和韵律计时语言是否会根据时间反转的片段的持续时间表现出不同的可理解度趋势。结果表明，跨语言的趋势非常相似，尤其是当片段持续时间的时间轴相对于说话人说话速度与每种语言平均速度的偏差进行归一化时。鉴于在先前的研究中已经表明并且在当前的语音材料中得到了很大程度的复制的研究中所研究的语言的元音比例的系统差异，这种相似性有些令人惊讶。这些发现表明，一个普遍的时间窗口，短于 20-40ms，在感知本地时间反转语音方面起着至关重要的作用，它作为一个缓冲区，可以在词汇和语义处理方面进行时间重组。
