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Anna Persson

About me

I'm a PhD student in Swedish/Nordic languages ​​at the Department of Swedish and Multilingualism. My research interests broadly concern listeners' processing of spoken language, more specifically, how the brain deals with the fact that we all vary in our pronunciations. I investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable stable speech perception across talkers, using a combination of acoustic analysis, perception experiments and computational models.

I have a background teaching Swedish as a second language for high school students and adult students. I have also worked with test item writing, test validation and assessment for Tisus (Test in Swedish for university studies).

Teaching

  • Introduction to psycholinguistics
  • Language assessment for teachers of Swedish as a second language
  • Qualifying course in Swedish for university studies

Research

As talkers, we all differ in our pronunciations, resulting in cross-talker differences in the mapping between acoustic cues and linguistic categories and meanings. From previous work, we know that listeners have a remarkable ability to rapidly adapt to the pronunciations of an unfamiliar talker, leading to stable cross-talker perception. What is less known is the specific mechanism(s) underlying this adaptive ability. A long-standing hypothesis in the literature is that listeners achieve stable cross-talker perception by normalizing the acoustic signal for talker-specific characteristics, related to anatomical differences in talker physiology (e.g., vocal tract length). Numerous accounts of pre-linguistic normalization have been proposed over the years. Widely used in variationist sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, and dialectology, accounts have often been compared and evaluated on how well they reduce category variability in vowel spaces. Less is known about their relative plausibility as models of human speech perception - how well they can explain what humans actually do. In my thesis, I investigate the predicted consequences of vowel normalization for stable cross-talker perception, using Swedish and English vowels. I approach this question by acoustic analysis, computational models and vowel perception experiments. In addition, I report on the static and dynamic acoustic characteristics of the modern-day Central Swedish vowel space.

Research projects

L1 talkers’ adaptation to L2 speech

L1 talkers’ adaptation to L2 speech. Computational and experimental approaches to vowel perception. This project investigates how the speech perception system deals with the fact that we all differ in our pronunciation.

Research

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Evaluating normalization accounts against the dense vowel space of Central Swedish

    2023. Anna Persson, T. Florian Jaeger. Frontiers in Psychology 14

    Article

    Talkers vary in the phonetic realization of their vowels. One influential hypothesis holds that listeners overcome this inter-talker variability through pre-linguistic auditory mechanisms that normalize the acoustic or phonetic cues that form the input to speech recognition. Dozens of competing normalization accounts exist-including both accounts specific to vowel perception and general purpose accounts that can be applied to any type of cue. We add to the cross-linguistic literature on this matter by comparing normalization accounts against a new phonetically annotated vowel database of Swedish, a language with a particularly dense vowel inventory of 21 vowels differing in quality and quantity. We evaluate normalization accounts on how they differ in predicted consequences for perception. The results indicate that the best performing accounts either center or standardize formants by talker. The study also suggests that general purpose accounts perform as well as vowel-specific accounts, and that vowel normalization operates in both temporal and spectral domains.

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