title: Perceptual learning for speech: Is there a return to normal?
abstract: Recent work on perceptual learning shows that listeners' phonemic representations dynamically adjust to reflect the speech they hear (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). We investigate how the perceptual system makes such adjustments, and what (if anything) causes the representations to return to their pre-perceptual learning settings. Listeners are exposed to a speaker whose pronunciation of a particular sound (either /s/ or /integral/) is ambiguous (e.g., halfway between /s/ and /integral/). After exposure, participants are tested for perceptual learning on two continua that range from /s/ to /integral/, one in the Same voice they heard during exposure, and one in a Different voice. To assess how representations revert to their prior settings, half of Experiment 1's participants were tested immediately after exposure; the other half performed a 25-min silent intervening task. The perceptual learning effect was actually larger after such a delay, indicating that simply allowing time to pass does not cause learning to fade. The remaining experiments investigate different ways that the system might unlearn a person's pronunciations: listeners hear the Same or a Different speaker for 25 min with either: no relevant (i.e., 'good') /s/ or /integral/ input (Experiment 2), one of the relevant inputs (Experiment 3), or both relevant inputs (Experiment 4). The results support a view of phonemic representations as dynamic and flexible, and suggest that they interact with both higher- (e.g., lexical) and lower-level (e.g., acoustic) information in important ways.
authors.affiliation: State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. tkraljic@hotmail.com
authors.forename: Tanya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kraljic
authors.forename: Arthur G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Samuel
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014163:Transfer, Psychology; D014833:Voice Quality