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Perceptual learning of phonetic information that indicates morphological structure
Katharine Barden1, Sarah Hawkins
1Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Phonetica
|February 12, 2014
Summary
Listeners can learn to better understand unfamiliar speech sounds when they are consistently linked to specific word structures, like the English /ri:/ prefix. This perceptual learning aids intelligibility in noisy conditions.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Auditory Perception
- Phonetics
Background:
- Familiarity with a speaker or accent aids speech perception.
- Limited understanding exists regarding acoustic-phonetic knowledge gained from unfamiliar talkers, especially concerning grammatical and prosodic distinctions.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate listeners' adaptation to a phonetic variant linked to a specific morphological context (English /ri:/ prefix).
- Examine the acoustic-phonetic knowledge acquired through exposure to unfamiliar speech patterns.
Main Methods:
- Utilized naturalistic stimuli and tasks to assess perceptual learning.
- Exposed listeners to stories featuring an atypical /ri:/ prefix variant.
- Assessed intelligibility in noise using a task including the atypical variant.
Main Results:
- Listeners exposed to the atypical /ri:/ prefix variant showed higher scores in an intelligibility-in-noise task.
- Perceptual learning demonstrated specificity to the /ri:/ prefix.
- Weak generalization of learning was observed for word-initial /ri:/ syllables outside the prefix context.
Conclusions:
- Exposure to context-specific phonetic variants enhances speech intelligibility.
- Perceptual learning can be specific yet show some generalization.
- Supports the development of probabilistic speech perception models with parallel representational levels.
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