publications

2023

1. Frontiers

   Comparing alignment toward American, British, and Indian English text-to-speech (TTS) voices: influence of social attitudes and talker guise

   N. Dodd, M. Cohn, and G. Zellou

   Frontiers in Computer Science, 2023

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   Text-to-speech (TTS) voices, which vary in their apparent native language and dialect, are increasingly widespread. In this paper, we test how speakers perceive and align toward TTS voices that represent American, British, and Indian dialects of English and the extent that social attitudes shape patterns of convergence and divergence. We also test whether top-down knowledge of the talker, manipulated as a “human” or “device” guise, mediates these attitudes and accommodation. Forty-six American English-speaking participants completed identical interactions with 6 talkers (2 from each dialect) and rated each talker on a variety of social factors. Accommodation was assessed with AXB perceptual similarity by a separate group of raters. Results show that speakers had the strongest positive social attitudes toward the Indian English voices and converged toward them more. Conversely, speakers rate the American English voices as less human-like and diverge from them. Finally, speakers overall show more accommodation toward TTS voices that were presented in a “human” guise. We discuss these results through the lens of the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT).

2022

1. CogSci

   Expectations and Noisy-Channel Processing of Relative Clauses in Arabic

   N. Dodd, and E. Morgan

   Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society., 2022

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   Some sentences are hard to read, and we don’t fully understand why. Memory-based and expectation-based constraints both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. We further investigate theories of sentence processing by exploring subject- and object-extracted relative clause processing in Standard Arabic. We conducted a self-paced reading task and found that SRCs are easier to process than ORCs in Arabic, in line with expectation-based theories. A follow-up analysis of comprehension question answers revealed that when suggested with the possibility of a noisy interpretation, readers preferentially accept an SRC interpretation over an ORC interpretation. Our future research will explore these findings and test the threshold for acceptance of noisy interpretations.