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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
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The bounds on flexibility in speech perception.

Matthias J Sjerps1, James M McQueen

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. matthias.sjerps@mpi.nl

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
|February 4, 2010
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Listeners can learn to perceive non-native speech sounds as native phonemes. Perceptual learning adapts to spectral similarity, allowing thorough integration of new sounds into existing language categories.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Auditory Perception
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • The human auditory system demonstrates remarkable plasticity in adapting to novel speech sounds.
  • Understanding the mechanisms of perceptual learning is crucial for explaining how listeners acquire new phonemes.
  • Native language phonology influences the interpretation of ambiguous or non-native speech input.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the extent to which listeners can learn to interpret a non-native sound (English 'th') as a native Dutch phoneme (/f/ or /s/).
  • To examine the role of spectral similarity and lexical bias in this perceptual learning process.
  • To determine if perceptual adjustments are robust enough to treat non-native sounds as fully native.

Main Methods:

  • Dutch listeners were exposed to the English 'th' sound replacing either /f/ or /s/ in Dutch words.
  • An identity-priming task was used to assess participants' interpretation of the exposure sound.
  • The exposure sound varied in clarity, including unambiguous fricatives and ambiguous mixtures, and signal-correlated noise.

Main Results:

  • Listeners successfully learned to interpret the 'th' sound as either /f/ or /s/, demonstrating significant perceptual learning.
  • Priming effects were strong regardless of whether the exposure sound was ambiguous or unambiguous.
  • When exposed to spectrally similar noise, listeners defaulted to interpreting it as /f/, indicating spectral similarity as a constraint.

Conclusions:

  • Perceptual learning of speech sounds is constrained by spectral similarity to existing phonological categories.
  • Within these spectral constraints, listeners can thoroughly adapt to and integrate non-native sounds as native phonemes.
  • This suggests a flexible and robust system for speech perception and language acquisition.