People understand speech well, despite pronunciation variation. Perceptual learning, where listeners are trained with acoustic features ambiguous between two phonemes and subsequently shift their perceived phoneme boundary, is one way listeners may compensate for variation (Norris et al 2003). These perceptual shifts, however, seem idiosyncratic to one speaker (Eisner & McQueen 2005, Kraljic & Samuel 2005), rarely generalizing to new speakers. We propose that lack of generalization is due to lack of experience mapping phonemes to specific continua; previous work uses continua like [s]-[f], whose midpoints rarely occur in speech. Ambiguous tokens that are never heard in real speech may be perceived as specific to the speaker used in training, preventing generalization. Use of a continuum occurring in accented speech, such as the mapping of English tenseness onto vowel duration, allows manipulation of the idiosyncrasy of the mapping. We train 13 listeners on an idiosyncratic duration mapping (lax to short duration, tense to ambiguous duration) and 11 on an Italian accent pattern (lax to ambiguous duration, tense to long), and test generalization to a different speaker. Listeners generalize the Italian accent, and generalize away from the idiosyncratic pattern. This suggests listeners generalize likely accents, treating unlikely patterns as idiosyncratic.
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September 2012
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September 01 2012
Idiosyncrasy and generalization in accent learning
Meghan Sumner;
Meghan Sumner
Linguistics, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA [email protected]
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Ed King
Ed King
Linguistics, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA [email protected]
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J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 132, 1935 (2012)
Citation
Meghan Sumner, Ed King; Idiosyncrasy and generalization in accent learning. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 September 2012; 132 (3_Supplement): 1935. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4755112
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