Past Event

“MALD: Massive Auditory Lexical Decision or what we can learn about speech comprehension with a really big database”

Dr. Benjamin Tucker
(University of Alberta)

The MALD (Massive Auditory Lexical Decision) database is a growing database of auditory lexical decision responses from thousands of participants designed to allow researchers to better understand how listeners understand speech. The first phase of MALD contains lexical decision responses to 26,800 words and 9,600 pseudo-words produced by a single male speaker of Western Canadian English. Both response time and accuracy are available as dependent variables with common predictors such as frequency, neighborhood density, number of syllables, stress location, and uniqueness point available. I describe the data and discuss several example analyses using the data. For example, different frequency measures have been compared using the MALD data. I describe work investigating the acoustic characteristics of all the words and pseudowords, which makes this analysis one of the more in-depth analyses of one speaker’s voice. I discuss the comprehension of pseudowords and talk about what factors influence participants “no” responses. I also discuss an investigation of how temporal variation is realized in conversational and laboratory speech and the ways in which it affects the processing of words in isolation. In conclusion, I return to the big question of what we can learn about speech comprehension from research using MALD.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies