Short-term perceptual tuning to talker characteristics

Abstract

When a listener encounters an unfamiliar talker, the ensuing perceptual accommodation to the unique characteristics of the talker has two aspects: (1) the listener assesses acoustic characteristics of speech to resolve the properties of the talker’s sound production; and, (2) the listener appraises the talker’s idiolect, subphonemic phonetic properties that compose the finest grain of linguistic production. A new study controlled a listener’s exposure to determine whether the perceptual benefit rests on specific segmental experience. Effects of sentence exposure were measured using a spoken word identification task of Easy words (likely words drawn from sparse neighborhoods of less likely words) and Hard words (less likely words drawn from dense neighborhoods of more likely words). Recognition of words was facilitated by exposure to voiced obstruent consonants. Overall, these findings indicate that talker-specific perceptual tuning might depend more on exposure to phonemically marked consonants than to exposure distributed across the phoneme inventory.

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

“…It would also indicate a need to revisit the interpretation of findings that speech perception can be affected by the (inferred) social identity of a talker (e.g., regional origin,Hay & Drager, 2010;Niedzielski, 1999; sex, Johnson et al, 1999;Strand, 1999; age, Walker & Hay, 2011;Waller et al, 2015; and individual identity, Nygaard et al, 1994;Remez et al, 2018). In sociophonetics and related fields, these findings are routinely attributed to talker-specific storage of category representations, without considering alternative explanations in terms of normalization.…”

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

“…It would also indicate a need to revisit the interpretation of findings that speech perception can be affected by the (inferred) social identity of a talker (e.g., regional origin,Hay & Drager, 2010;Niedzielski, 1999; sex, Johnson et al, 1999;Strand, 1999; age, Walker & Hay, 2011;Waller et al, 2015; and individual identity, Nygaard et al, 1994;Remez et al, 2018). In sociophonetics and related fields, these findings are routinely attributed to talker-specific storage of category representations, without considering alternative explanations in terms of normalization.…”