Perceptual tracking of distinct distributional regularities within a single voice

The speech signal is inherently variable and listeners need to recalibrate when local, short-term distributions of acoustic dimensions deviate from long-term representation. The present experiment investigated the specificity of this perceptual adjustment, addressing whether the perceptual system is capable of tracking differing simultaneous short-term acoustic distributions of the same speech categories, conditioned by context. The results indicated that instead of aggregating over the contextual variation, listeners tracked separate distributional statistics for instances of speech categories experienced in different phonetic/lexical contexts, suggesting that perceptual learning is not only influenced by distributional statistics, but also by external factors such as contextual information.