Foreign-accented speech contains multiple sources of variation that listeners learn to accommodate. Extending previous findings showing that exposure to high-variation training facilitates perceptual learning of accented speech, the current study examines to what extent the structure of training materials affects learning. During training, native adult speakers of American English transcribed sentences spoken in English by native Spanish-speaking adults. In Experiment 1, training stimuli were blocked by speaker, sentence, or randomized with respect to speaker and sentence (Variable training). At test, listeners transcribed novel English sentences produced by Spanish-accented speakers. Listeners’ transcription accuracy was highest in the Variable condition, suggesting that varying both speaker identity and sentence across training trials enabled listeners to generalize their learning to novel speakers and linguistic content. Experiment 2 assessed the extent to which ordering of training tokens by a single factor, speaker intelligibility, would facilitate speaker-independent accent learning, finding that listeners’ test performance did not reliably differ across conditions. Overall, these results suggest that the structure of training exposure, specifically trial-by-trial variation on both speaker’s voice and linguistic content, facilitates learning of the systematic properties of accented speech. The current findings suggest a crucial role of training structure in optimizing perceptual learning. Beyond characterizing the types of variation listeners encode in their representations of spoken utterances, theories of spoken language processing should incorporate the role of training structure in learning lawful variation in speech.

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound-to-meaning correspondences. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. The present study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for dimensional adjective pairs (big/small, round/pointy, fast/slow, moving/still) and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity.

Foreign-accented speech contains multiple sources of variation that listeners learn to accommodate. Extending previous findings showing that exposure to high-variation training facilitates perceptual learning of accented speech, the current study examines to what extent the structure of training materials affects learning. During training, native adult speakers of American English transcribed sentences spoken in English by native Spanish-speaking adults. In Experiment 1, training stimuli were blocked by speaker, sentence, or randomized with respect to speaker and sentence (Variable training). At test, listeners transcribed novel English sentences produced by Spanish-accented speakers. Listeners' transcription accuracy was highest in the Variable condition, suggesting that varying both speaker identity and sentence across training trials enabled listeners to generalize their learning to novel speakers and linguistic content. Experiment 2 assessed the extent to which ordering of training tokens by a single factor, speaker intelligibility, would facilitate speaker-independent accent learning, finding that listeners' test performance did not reliably differ across conditions. Overall, these results suggest that the structure of training exposure, specifically trial-by-trial variation on both speaker's voice and linguistic content, facilitates learning of the systematic properties of accented speech. The current findings suggest a crucial role of training structure in optimizing perceptual learning. Beyond characterizing the types of variation listeners encode in their representations of spoken utterances, theories of spoken language processing should incorporate the role of training structure in learning lawful variation in speech.

Listeners use lexical knowledge to modify the mapping from acoustics to speech sounds, but the timecourse of experience that informs lexically guided perceptual learning is unknown. Some data suggest that learning is contingent on initial exposure to atypical productions, while other data suggest that learning reflects only the most recent exposure. Here we seek to reconcile these findings by assessing the type and timecourse of exposure that promote robust lexcially guided perceptual learning. In three experiments, listeners (n = 560) heard 20 critical productions interspersed among 200 trials during an exposure phase and then categorized items from an ashi-asi continuum in a test phase. In Experiment 1, critical productions consisted of ambiguous fricatives embedded in either /s/-or /ʃ/-biasing contexts. Learning was observed; the /s/-bias group showed more asi responses compared to the /ʃ/-bias group. In Experiment 2, listeners heard ambiguous and clear productions in a consistent context. Order and lexical bias were manipulated between-subjects, and perceptual learning occurred regardless of the order in which the clear and ambiguous productions were heard. In Experiment 3, listeners heard ambiguous fricatives in both /s/-and /ʃ/-biasing contexts. Order differed between two exposure groups, and no difference between groups was observed at test. Moreover, the results showed a monotonic decrease in learning across experiments, in line with decreasing exposure to stable lexically biasing contexts, and were replicated across novel stimulus sets. In contrast to previous findings showing that either initial or most recent experience are critical for lexically guided perceptual learning, the current results suggest that perceptual learning reflects cumulative experience with a talker's input over time.

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