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Over 3.200 consistent misconceptions in English identified in an online available corpus

Ikerbasque

A group comprising UPV/EHU Professor Maria Luisa García Lecumberri, Ikerbasque Research Professor Martin Cooke and researchers from the University of Sheffield Jon Barker and Ricard Marxer have identified 3,207 consistent misconceptions pertaining to English, that is, mistakes made by a significant number of listeners.

To do this, they conducted a large-scale study with 212 participants and more than 300,000 word presentations, which the researchers took out of context, presenting them isolated or with background noise. The study, published in the journal Acustic Society of America, was able to identify 3,207 mismatched misperceptions and assembled them into a corpus, unique in its category and available online: http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/ ECCC /

In the words of the main researcher prof. García Lecumberri, "these studies help us to better understand the mechanisms of speech perception, and the better we know these mechanisms, the better those who suffer from problems of perception can be helped, both technically and clinically”.

More information: http://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.4967185