The role of previous experience in the perceptual adaptation of accented speech Public
Lin Siyu (Fall 2023)
Published
Abstract
Adaptation to accented speech has been a long-standing problem in the field of speech perception, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In recent years, accounts of adaptation to accented speech posit an exemplar-based mechanism, in which the extent to which listeners successfully generalize learning of accented productions to other accented talkers depends on the acoustic similarity between the two talkers. However, listeners’ prior perceptual experience may also be involved in the process of adaptation. This study investigated whether listeners’ prior perceptual experience would facilitate cross-talker generalization. Experiment 1 was designed to replicate and extend previous findings showing perceptual learning of /d/-final productions in Mandarin-accented English (Xie et al, 2017). Listeners were asked to perform a lexical decision task in an exposure phase and then tested in a cross-modal priming task with auditory stimuli produced by the same talker. Experiment 2 was designed to determine if the linguistic experience would influence the extent of learning. Two experiments (2a and 2b) were run in which the critical exposure words had vowel durations that were artificially extended by 80 ms (2a), and the other had critical test words with vowel durations that were artificially extended by 80 ms (2b). We expected that listeners would be more likely to perceptually adapt and generalize to productions that changed from less to more English-like productions between the exposure and test. Overall, we failed to replicate the perceptual adaptation effect reported previously, potentially because the acoustic difference between the critical exposure words and test words was larger than in previous work. We generated updated predictions for Experiment 2 to examine the degree of acoustic difference across exposure and test. Even though the results again did not provide evidence for learning, numerical trends were consistent with a role for acoustic similarity in the generalization of learning.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Variations at talker- and group-specific level 1
Underlying mechanisms of speech adaptation 3
Predictions from theoretical models for speech adaptation 7
Directionality in speech adaptation 9
The current study 10
Experiment 1 13
Participant 14
Materials 15
Procedure 17
Results 19
Discussion 21
Experiment 2 23
Participant 25
Materials 26
Procedure 27
Results 27
Discussion 30
General Discussion 31
References 34
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