Speech segmentation errors

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mjfleck2000
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Speech segmentation errors

Postby mjfleck2000 » Mon Aug 28, 2017 7:23 pm

I read a post here by user reinekee which contained the phrase “Speech segmentation errors”. It described exactly a problem I had with a portion of a broadcast from the audio program Buenos Días America ( the news in Spanish). Speech segmentation errors means that what I thought I heard and what the person really said do not match.
During a portion of a broadcast from Buenos Días America, I misunderstood what a reporter said. Here is what I heard (in Spanish):

Lo que cipo demos aver es que no hay documentos…
What???? I do not understand this at all….. cipo???? demos ????

I downloaded the audio from the program and replayed this portion dozens of times trying to understand what was been said. I thought that perhaps I had misspelled “cipo” and searched a dictionary for words like “sipo” and “zipo”. Aarrrgghh…. this sentence does not make sense.

After weeks (yes, I spent WEEKS trying to figure out this sentence), I realized that I might be dividing up the words incorrectly and that is why the words don’t make sense.
So, listening again for a few dozen times it finally hit me!!!! No me digas!!!!

What I now hear the reporter saying is:

Lo que sí podemos saber es que no hay documentos.

Yes, yes yes….. THIS makes sense! Not only does this make sense, but now when I watch a TV program I often hear this sentence jump out. (sometimes the final verb is different saber/reconecer)

Anyone care to add a “speech segmentation error” example from a language that you were finally able to solve?
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby Speakeasy » Mon Aug 28, 2017 7:54 pm

I am under the impression that this phenomenon was reviewed under the following discussion thread:

Constantly Confusing Words in French, When Will It End??? Help???
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6581
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby aabram » Tue Aug 29, 2017 9:09 am

Don't get me started on reading and parsing Mandarin!
Oh, a string of characters which doesn't make any sense! Let's look it up! What could it be... Is it a 2 letter word followed by another 2 letter word? No. Then is it 1 letter word + 3 letter word? Apparently not. Or ist it 4 letter chengyu (proverb)? Still doesn't make any sense. Then... perhaps it's foreign name they've tried to fit approximate spelling with random characters and it's actually 5 characters long? Yup. 索尔斯坦森 is actually Thorstein.
For crying out loud, people, stop naming your offspring Thorstein!
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby William Camden » Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:33 pm

Spanish and French speakers love to run words together. It may be a general Romance languages characteristic, although I have read that the speech tempo of Romanian is slower.
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby Cabral » Tue Aug 29, 2017 7:06 pm

Although I having been "consuming english" voraciously through listening for the past five years, I still face the same problem as you do. Sometimes I find myself listening to the same audio over and over, just to walk away frustraded at not being able to distinguish between words in a sentence. It is as if I had some sort of aural deficiency. It's frustrating.

One thing that has helped me was to listening intensively, paying maximum attention to different sorts of audio. Jotting down nuances that comes to mind. Do it with different types of audio (radios, podcasts, tv, audiobooks) and you will see improvement.

I've learned english mostly through extensive reading and listening. But, after hitting a seemed-to-be-forever-lasting plateau in my listening skills, I would come to realized that I had gaps which would have to be tackled in another manner other than ''extensive passive input".
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby reineke » Fri Nov 02, 2018 2:26 pm

The OP likely read about it here:

Homophonic effect when listening to word combinations
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=6623
Last edited by reineke on Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby patrickwilken » Fri Nov 02, 2018 2:34 pm

William Camden wrote:Spanish and French speakers love to run words together. It may be a general Romance languages characteristic, although I have read that the speech tempo of Romanian is slower.


It also happens a fair bit in Australian English compared to say British English.
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby Querneus » Fri Nov 02, 2018 4:38 pm

Just yesterday I struggled with the following sentence:

這大致就是挑選下一任老闆的方法。
zhe4 da4zhi4 jiu4 shi4 tiao1xuan3 xia4 yi1 ren4 lao3ban3 de fang1fa3

This is a bit different, because I recognized the syllables correctly, and so to a good extent the words, but the phrases are what I couldn't divide correctly. Should 下 xia4 be interpreted as a complement of the verb 挑選 tiao1xuan3 'to choose' (as a shortened form of 一下, to "soften" the meaning of the verb making it more polite), or should it be understood as part of the direct object after it (as 下一 "the next [noun]")?

As a native speaker explained to me, it is the latter. The sentence says "this is more or less the way to choose the boss for the next period."
William Camden wrote:Spanish and French speakers love to run words together. It may be a general Romance languages characteristic, although I have read that the speech tempo of Romanian is slower.

North American English also does this very much. Examples of languages that don't are German and Mandarin, but then you still have to segment the well-defined syllables into words (as in aabram's "Thorstein" example above), and words into phrases (as in my example), so the ambiguity doesn't really go away. (Well, presumably, languages with fixed stress like Finnish, Polish and Inuktitut have well-defined words, but they probably still have syllable-level and phrase-level ambiguity...)
Last edited by Querneus on Sun Nov 04, 2018 2:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby reineke » Sat Nov 03, 2018 3:26 pm

"Last year I heard:
de tal palo tal (la) silla - or something like that.

Now I hear: DE TAL PALO, TAL ASTILLA
I also see that one Italian person also misheard the first version."
Last edited by reineke on Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Speech segmentation errors

Postby reineke » Sun Jan 20, 2019 7:10 pm

Syllabic features
Last edited by reineke on Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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