Perceptual Learning of Accented Speech

What we do (not) know about the mechanisms underlying adaptive speech perception: A computational framework and review

“…right column of Figure 19) or changes in the beliefs about category covariances (small 𝜈 𝑐,0 𝑠, e.g., bottom row in Figure 19). This replicates an observation made in Kleinschmidt and Jaeger (2015, p. 168;see also 2016;, and highlights that "category expansion" and "category shifts" can both be seen as consequences of distributional learning (see also Bent & Baese-Berk, 2021;. Figure 20 serves to further clarify how the different parameter settings for 𝜅 𝑐,0 and 𝜈 𝑐,0 𝑠 affect the expected category likelihoods for a subset of the panels of Figure 19, leading to category shifts, expansion, shrinkage, or rotation, depending on both the model parameters and the input during exposure.…”

“…It has shaped linguistic theories (e.g., Bybee, 2001;Goldinger & Azuma, 2004;Hay et al, 2019;Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007;Pierrehumbert, 2001) as well as theories about the interface between social and linguistic cognition (e.g., Babel et al, 2019;Creel & Bregman, 2011;Foulkes & Hay, 2015;Sumner et al, 2014). Further illustrating the influence of this idea, several recent reviews have gone as far as to discuss what types of representational changes underlie the effects of recent exposure (e.g., "category expansion" vs. "category shifts"), rather than whether representational changes are indeed necessary to explain adaptive speech perception (e.g., Baese-Berk et al, 2020;Bent & Baese-Berk, 2021;.…”

“…Recent introductions to, and discussions of, this perspective are provided in Bent and Baese-Berk (2021), Kurumada and Roettger (2021), Quam and Creel (2021), and . Figure 2.…”

“…Following exposure, listeners in either group are tested on the unfamiliar accent. In an influential study, Bradlow and Bent (2008) As in the case of perceptual recalibration, accent adaptation is often attributed to changes in category representations (e.g., Bent & Baese-Berk, 2021;Sidaras et al, 2009;Sumner & Samuel, 2009;Tzeng et al, 2016;. This might in part be due to the intuition that the other change mechanisms are not sufficiently flexible to explain adaptation to complex differences between accents.…”

Perceiving gender while perceiving language: Integrating psycholinguistics and gender theory

“…Research in speech perception has used a wide variety of techniques, but there has not yet been a systematic interrogation of how different types of social information might affect listeners' responses differently in each of these designs and tasks. For example, studies have examined whether social information affects speech processing by measuring sentence intelligibility (Babel & Russell, 2015; McGowan, 2015), the speed of lexical decisions (Strand, 2000; Walker & Hay, 2011), memory for voices (Mack & Munson, 2012), and perceptual learning (Bent & Baese‐Berk, 2021; McAuliffe & Babel, 2016). Studies have used priming that was very explicit, like presenting a picture of the talker, as in Babel and Russell, or very implicitly, like the surreptitious placing of stuffed toys in Hay and Drager or the presence of gendered language in a grammaticality judgment task, as in Munson et al (2017).…”