Short-term and long-term adaptive changes in prosodic comprehension

Speech prosody richly encodes both linguistic and social meaning. However, the prosody-meaning mapping varies across contexts and talkers, contributing to the lack of invariance problem in speech perception. This article extends a recent line of work targeting the adaptivity of the human comprehension system, mapping variable input to linguistic meanings in a talker-sensitive manner. Specifically, we investigate the stability of adaptation: Once a listener adapts to the prosody of a particular talker, how long does the effect last? We conducted a large-scale (N = 424) adaptation experiment using a two-session paradigm in which listeners go through a pretest, exposure, posttest sequence in the first session, in which exposure and feedback disambiguate an ambiguous prosodic contour as a question or a statement in a between-participants manner. They were then invited back on the 2nd day after a delay of 3, 5, or 7 days to repeat the same sequence. The results provide novel evidence that adaptation is both rapid and stable. Listeners showed robust adaptation within the first few trials of exposure in the first session, and they maintained some adaptive shift even after a delay of up to 7 days. This finding extends the scientific knowledge about the longevity of adaptive shifts seen across levels of speech hierarchy. We discuss possible memory mechanisms that support the long-term maintenance of cross-talker adaptation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).