Asymmetries in Perceptual Adjustments to Non-Canonical Pronunciations

Abstract

This paper examines two plausible mechanisms supporting sound category adaptation: directional shifts towards the novel pronunciation or a general category relaxation of criteria. Focusing on asymmetries in adaptation to the voicing patterns of English coronal fricatives, we suggest that typology or synchronic experience affect adaptation. A corpus study of coronal fricative substitution patterns confirmed that North American English listeners are more likely to be exposed to devoiced /z/ than voiced /s/. Across two perceptual adaptation experiments, listeners in test conditions heard naturally produced devoiced /z/ or voiced /s/ in critical items within sentences, while control listeners were exposed to identical sentences with canonical pronunciations. Perceptual adaptation was tested via a lexical decision test, with devoiced /z/ or voiced /s/, as well as a novel alveopalatalized pronunciation, to determine whether adaptation was targeted in the direction of the exposed variant or reflected a more general relaxation. Results indicate there was directional and word-specific adaptation for /z/-devoicing with no evidence for generalization. Conversely, there was evidence of /s/-voicing generalizing and eliciting general category relaxation. These results underscore the role of perceptual experiences, and support an evaluation stage in perceptual learning, where listeners assess whether to update a representation.

Bad maps may not always get you lost: Lexically driven perceptual recalibration for substituted phonemes

“…However, the relationship between lexically driven perceptual recalibration and accommodation to accented speech remains to be established. In fact, the currently available evidence does not support a link between the two (Babel et al, 2021 ; Zheng & Samuel, 2020 ).…”

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

“…The quality of the evidence is mixed, however, with some finding support for expectations exerting influence in both intelligibility and accentedness (e.g., [ 19 ]), only accentedness (e.g., [ 22 ]), or a mixed bag (e.g., [ 24 ]) when intelligibility and accentedness are investigated in tandem. Whether adaptation to accent and ethnicity associations is targeted or global is also mixed [ 26 , 27 ]; recent evidence in support of both targeted and global adaptation mechanisms at work in lexically-guided perceptual adaptation is presented in Babel et al [ 30 ]. The conflicting results within this body of literature may be expected due to the uniqueness of the subject population—rarely are the social and linguistic experiences of the listener population described at length—and the specific social associations and demographic facts of a speech community.…”