Talker adaptation in speech perception: Adjusting the signal or the representations?

Dahan, Delphine; Drucker, Sarah J.; Scarborough, Rebecca

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.06.003

Cited by 117 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…A possible explanation is that each participant heard only one speaker. As listeners typically adapt very rapidly to a new speaker (e.g., Dahan, Drucker, and Scarborough, 2008), participants had probably already adapted to the speaker during the first block. Consequently, the differences between the speakers did not play a substantial role.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?

Hanique

Aalders

Ernestus

2013

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This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed.Keywords: speech comprehension, exemplar effects, pronunciation variation, acoustic reduction 3 Several models of speech comprehension assume that the mental lexicon stores the pronunciation of a word with two types of representations, namely abstract representations and exemplars (e.g., Goldinger, 2007;McLennan, Luce, and Charles-Luce, 2003). Abstract representations are strings of sound symbols like phonemes or phonological features, which only contain information about acoustic properties that distinguish between these symbols. In contrast, clouds of exemplars represent many occurrences of words that the language user has uttered or heard. Each exemplar is a detailed representation corresponding to the speech signal of one occurrence and thus contains subtle acoustic information, for example about the word's exact pronunciation or the speaker's voice. Many articles in the literature point to a role of exemplars in word comprehension. This study investigates the robustness of these exemplar effects.Exemplar effects have been established in several priming experiments (e.g., Bradlow, Nygaard, and Pisoni, 1999;Craik and Kirsner, 1974;Goh, 2005;Goldinger, 1996;Janse, 2008;Mattys and Liss, 2008;McLennan et al., 2003;McLennan and Luce, 2005;Palmeri, Goldinger, and Pisoni, 1993).These experiments contained repeated words and the comprehension of the second occurrence of a word (the target) is expected to be facilitated by the first occurrence (the prime). Primes and targets were completely identical, that is the same token, or they differed in speech rate, time-compression, the realization of a certain segment (e.g., intervocalic /t,d/ produced as [t,d] or as a flap in American English), or the speaker's voice. Most experiments showed...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?

Hanique

Aalders

Ernestus

2013

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“…It is unclear, however, which specific phenomena the listeners tuned in to. Dahan et al (2008) showed that listeners can tune in to regional variation of a given speaker's native language. In their study, listeners adapted to a regional phenomenon (the raising of the vowel /ae/ before /ɡ/, but not before /k/) which facilitates word recognition by reducing ambiguity in the initial part of words like bag and back.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, like Dahan et al (2008), we wanted to test listeners' ability to adjust to naturally-occurring idiosyncrasies of a speaker, but unlike them we were interested in stylistic rather than in geographical variation as the source of the idiosyncrasies. Geographical variation is tied to groups of speakers (e.g.…”

Section: Speaker-specific Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch

Poellmann

Bosker

McQueen

et al. 2014

Journal of Phonetics

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A B S T R A C TThis study investigates if and how listeners adapt to reductions in casual continuous speech. In a perceptuallearning variant of the visual-world paradigm, two groups of Dutch participants were exposed to either segmental (/b/ → [ʋ]) or syllabic (ver-→ [fː]) reductions in spoken Dutch sentences. In the test phase, both groups heard both kinds of reductions, but now applied to different words. In one of two experiments, the segmental reduction exposure group was better than the syllabic reduction exposure group in recognizing new reduced /b/-words. In both experiments, the syllabic reduction group showed a greater target preference for new reduced ver-words. Learning about reductions was thus applied to previously unheard words. This lexical generalization suggests that mechanisms compensating for segmental and syllabic reductions take place at a prelexical level, and hence that lexical access involves an abstractionist mode of processing. Existing abstractionist models need to be revised, however, as they do not include representations of sequences of segments (corresponding e.g. to ver-) at the prelexical level.

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“…An alternative possibility, however, is that learning reflects the tuning of transformational processes that enable the listener to more efficiently translate ambiguous input to the (unshifted) representation. Dahan, Drucker, and Scarborough (2008) addressed this question by looking at the effect that exposure to one nonstandard pronunciation (e.g., raised [ ] before / /, as in some speakers' pronunciations of the word bag) has on subsequent perception of a different, related pronunciation (e.g., standard [ ] before / /, as in the word back). Using eyetracking as their measure, Dahan et al found that exposure to a speaker with a raised vowel (in words such as bag) caused listeners to be more likely to interpret the standard pronunciation / / as the onset of / / (as opposed to finding the onset ambiguous between / / and / /, as they would before exposure).…”

Section: Theme II Perceptual Learning As Phonetic Retuningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual learning for speech

Samuel

Kraljic

2009

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

225

190

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Adult language users have an enormous amount of experience with speech in their native language. As a result, they have very well-developed processes for categorizing the sounds of speech that they hear. Despite this very high level of experience, recent research has shown that listeners are capable of redeveloping their speech categorization to bring it into alignment with new variation in their speech input. This reorganization of phonetic space is a type of perceptual learning, or recalibration, of speech processes. In this article, we review several recent lines of research on perceptual learning for speech.

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Talker adaptation in speech perception: Adjusting the signal or the representations?

Cited by 117 publications

References 23 publications

How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?

How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?

Perceptual adaptation to segmental and syllabic reductions in continuous spoken Dutch

Perceptual learning for speech

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