Listeners rapidly adapt to current conditions: "Good-enough" adaptation in multitalker speech perception.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Auditory Perception
• Speech Processing

Background:

• Listeners must adapt to variable speech input for successful recognition.
• Talker-specific adaptation involves either generalizing or individuating phoneme categories.
• Previous research is divided on whether listeners generalize or individuate talker-specific categories.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the conditions under which listeners generalize or individuate talker-specific phoneme categories.
• To determine if listeners form talker-specific categories or generalize adaptations.
• To examine the flexibility and limitations of speech category adaptation.

Main Methods:

• Five experiments utilized a distributional learning paradigm.
• Participants acquired novel voicing boundaries for new talkers.
• Testing involved generalization to novel talkers and assessing retention over time.

Main Results:

• Listeners generalized novel phoneme category boundaries to new talkers.
• No evidence of talker-specific category formation was found, even with simultaneous or supervised learning.
• Rapid learning and unlearning of categories occurred, indicating flexible adaptation to the immediate listening environment.

Conclusions:

• Listeners employ a "good-enough" adaptation strategy, adjusting a single category boundary for each new talker.
• This flexible, generalized adaptation appears sufficient for everyday speech perception.
• Talker-specific category formation is not the primary mechanism for adapting to individual talkers.