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ERIC Number: EJ723936
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2005-Sep
Pages: 38
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0285
EISSN: N/A
Perceptual Learning for Speech: Is There a Return to Normal?
Kraljic, Tanya; Samuel, Arthur G.
Cognitive Psychology, v51 n2 p141-178 Sep 2005
Recent work on perceptual learning shows that listeners' phonemic representations dynamically adjust to reflect the speech they hear (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). We investigate how the perceptual system makes such adjustments, and what (if anything) causes the representations to return to their pre-perceptual learning settings. Listeners are exposed to a speaker whose pronunciation of a particular sound (either /s/ or /[integral]/) is ambiguous (e.g., halfway between /s/ and /[integral]/). After exposure, participants are tested for perceptual learning on two continua that range from /s/ to /[integral]/, one in the Same voice they heard during exposure, and one in a Different voice. To assess how representations revert to their prior settings, half of Experiment 1's participants were tested immediately after exposure; the other half performed a 25-min silent intervening task. The perceptual learning effect was actually larger after such a delay, indicating that simply allowing time to pass does not cause learning to fade. The remaining experiments investigate different ways that the system might unlearn a person's pronunciations: listeners hear the Same or a Different speaker for 25 min with either: no relevant (i.e., "good") /s/ or /[integral]/ input (Experiment 2), one of the relevant inputs (Experiment 3), or both relevant inputs (Experiment 4). The results support a view of phonemic representations as dynamic and flexible, and suggest that they interact with both higher- (e.g., lexical) and lower-level (e.g., acoustic) information in important ways.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A