Talker adaptation in speech perception: adjusting the signal or the representations?
Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /ae/ is raised before /g/, but not before /k/. Results from two experiments showed that listeners' identification of /k/-final words like back (which are unaffected by the dialect) was facilitated by prior exposure to their dialect-affected /g/-final counterparts, e.g., bag. This facilitation occurred because the competition between interpretations, e.g., bag or back, while hearing the initial portion of the input [bae], was mitigated by the reduced probability for the input to correspond to bag as produced by this talker. Thus, adaptation to an accent is not just a matter of adjusting the speech signal as it is being heard; adaptation involves dynamic adjustment of the representations stored in the lexicon, according to the characteristics of the speaker or the context.
Dahan
Delphine
D
Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104-6228, USA. dahan@psych.upenn.edu
Drucker
Sarah J
SJ
Scarborough
Rebecca A
RA
D001288:Attention; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014705:Verbal Behavior