You have probably sung a favourite song for years, completely sure of every word, and then discovered the actual lyrics say something entirely different. This occurs so regularly, there is a term for it. That’s not to say you’re hard of hearing or impatient. Instead, it gives a look into how the brain transforms raw sound into meaning. Speech arrives as a rapid, unbroken stream, and the brain must work out in real time which words it contains. This usually works OK, but occasionally the brain will fill in a gap with its best guess, and it guesses poorly. (Warren, 1970). The article clarifies the mechanics of auditory perception and the reasons for the potential confusion of certain sounds. It clarifies how context and noise outside affect our auditory perception.
Separating Speech Is Difficult Despite Appearances
There are no tiny spaces in between spoken sentences. Syllables get run together in a sung line. Singers stretch, clip, or slur sounds all the time for purely musical reasons. So, listeners have to break one continuous stream of sound into discrete words, and they do this naturally, without realising. Research suggests the brain starts narrowing down candidate words before a word has even finished (Marslen-Wilson, 1987). If the early assumption is wrong, then the mistake may go unnoticed.
Mondegreens: A Word for the Mistake
Sylvia Wright, a writer, coined the term “mondegreens” in a 1954 piece for Harper’s Magazine. As a child, she had misheard a passage in an old Scottish ballad, “laid him on the green”, which became “Lady Mondegreen” in her mind. The coined term persisted and currently refers to any misinterpreted lyric, particularly in music. Certain mondegreens are amusing as the erroneous interpretation generates a semblance of meaning independently. Others just show that a single stretch of sound can reasonably be heard more than one way.
When Sounds Overlap
Many speaking sounds are near one another. The main acoustic cue to use is the voice onset time. The amount of time between the consonant release and the start of vocal fold vibration. When saying the voiced consonant /b/ in English, the voice begins at the moment of release (Lisker and Abramson, 1964). If there is a large amount of noise in the composition, or the action is fast, this can be very short and can therefore be misinterpreted.
Therefore, more information would be required to determine what sound was heard. When a sound is just in between two categories, the listener will use surrounding information to make their decision. William Ganong, in famous research, discovered that when a sound was halfway between two choices, individuals were more likely to hear the one that made a legitimate word (Ganong, 1980).
Similar-sounding words also compete with each other for recognition. Vocabulary items with several auditory neighbours, such as “bat,” “pat,” and “mat,” are processed at a slower rate than those with fewer neighbours, as the listener is required to choose from a larger pool of options (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998). The brain is simultaneously evaluating many candidates.
Expectation and context work hard
No sound is heard in solitude. Computational representations of speech perception show that our knowledge of words influences the perception of individual sounds via feedforward. In the TRACE model, for example, information moves both upward, from sounds to words, and downward, from words back to sounds (McClelland & Elman, 1986). Linguistic expectation works at this word and sentence level.
An understanding of language, grammatical structures, and common expressions will predict future content, so preparing the ear to favour certain sounds. An individual who has listened to a chorus several times has a strong expectation of what will follow, and the brain may just present that desire as if it were the actual auditory experience. The context also helps at the sentence level. In early trials, it was shown that individuals were far better at repeating statements heard in noise if these sentences were meaningful and grammatical, rather than merely random sequences of words(Miller & Isard, 1963).
The Brain Fills in Blanks You Never Notice
One of the most striking demonstrations comes from Richard Warren, who took a recorded word and swapped out one speech sound for a cough. Warren (1970) showed that the word was perceived as a whole by the listeners meaning they couldn’t identify the missing consonant. This shows phonemic restoration, and that perception is an active process. The brain doesn’t merely passively accept what comes into the ear. Sound is the most natural. Anticipation in linguistics differs from phonemic restoration. Anticipation may affect the interpretation of a sound post-hearing; however, phonemic restoration supplies the absent sound, leaving the listener unaware of any omission.
Accents, Familiarity, and Noise
1. Background noise
Everything is harder with background noise. Music, crowds, low audio quality, all conceal elements of the voice signal, so the brain has to use context and understanding of words even more. One evaluation of speech recognition in difficult circumstances discusses how listeners use this higher-level knowledge when the signal is deteriorated (Mattys et al., 2012). That’s a huge part of why a song over a loud vehicle audio is so much simpler to mishear than the same music through a great set of headphones.
2. Non-Native Listener Speakers’ Access to Semantic Context
Meaningful concepts help non-native listeners, too. Bradlow and Alexander found that semantic prompts improved speech comprehension in noisy environments for non-native listeners (Bradlow & Alexander, 2007). Clear. Carefully articulated speech and coherent speaking provide these listeners an additional advantage (Bradlow & Bent, 2002).
3. Mastering Accents
Knowledge can be helpful but can also be harmful. The gaps in the knowledge will cause the listener to fill in the gaps, but will mean that they will also hear what they expect to hear. Eventually, all accents are understandable. Listeners, too, adapt to unfamiliar accents. A brief exposure to a foreign-accented speaker frequently improves overall listening abilities, although the rate and extent of this adaptation are different amongst listeners and contexts (Clarke & Garrett, 2004).
Conclusion
When misreading the lyrics, you’re not being distracted, and your brain is doing what it should be doing. The most important thing to take away from this is not to be suspicious of everything but to look at how confident you are. When a piece of music shocks you in the future, look at the lyrics in writing and think about what expectations your brain could have had. A lot of the listening happens before the conscious focus starts.
References +
- Bradlow, A. R., & Alexander, J. A. (2007). Semantic and phonetic enhancements for speech-in-noise recognition by native and non-native listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121(4), 2339–2349. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2642103
- Bradlow, A. R., & Bent, T. (2002). The clear speech effect for non-native listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 112(1), 272–284. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1487837
- Clarke, C. M., & Garrett, M. F. (2004). Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(6), 3647–3658. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1815131
- Ganong, W. F. (1980). Phonetic categorisation in auditory word perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 6(1), 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.6.1.110
- Lisker, L., & Abramson, A. S. (1964). A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements. WORD, 20(3), 384–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1964.11659830
- Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition. Cognition, 25(1–2), 71–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(87)90005-9
- Mattys, S. L., Davis, M. H., Bradlow, A. R., & Scott, S. K. (2012). Speech recognition in adverse conditions: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27(7–8), 953–978. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.705006
- McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18(1), 1–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(86)90015-0
- Miller, G. A., & Isard, S. (1963). Some perceptual consequences of linguistic rules. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 2(3), 217–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022- 5371(63)80087-0
- Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1998). When words compete: Levels of Processing in Perception of Spoken Words. Psychological Science, 9(4), 325–329. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467- 9280.00064;WEBSITE:WEBSITE:SAGE;WGROUP:STRING:PUBLICATION
- Warren, R. M. (1970). Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds. Science, 167(3917), 392–393. https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.167.3917.392;PAGE:STRING:ARTICLE/CHAPTER
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