Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Perception
• Speech Processing

Background:

• Listeners can accommodate speech variations from anatomical (speaker/sex) and sociolinguistic (accent) sources.
• Adaptation to speaker/sex variability may be pre-lexical, while accent adaptation might need explicit feedback.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if listeners adapt to speaker/sex and accent variations differently.
• To test the hypothesis that accent adaptation requires explicit learning cues.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Dutch and Australian-English (AusE) listeners trained to discriminate Dutch vowels from one speaker.
• Tested vowel categorization with a novel speaker (speaker/sex change) versus a novel Flemish speaker (speaker/sex + accent change).
• Experiment 2: AusE listeners received feedback during categorization of accented vowels.

Main Results:

• Listeners successfully adapted to speaker/sex changes but not accent changes without feedback.
• AusE listeners, with feedback in Experiment 2, could categorize accented vowels.
• Adaptation to speaker differences occurred pre-lexically.

Conclusions:

• Adapting to accents is a two-step process: pre-lexical adaptation to speaker characteristics, followed by contextual adaptation to accent variations.
• Explicit feedback or contextual cues (like word meaning) are crucial for adjusting perceptual category boundaries for accents.