The role of previous experience in the perceptual adaptation of accented speech 公开

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

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Subfield / Discipline	Cognition and Development
Degree	M.A.
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Cognitive
关键词	speech perception perceptual adaptation
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Lynne Nygaard, Emory University
Committee Members	Danny Dilks, Emory University Phil Wolff, Emory University

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