Clopper Cynthia G, Pisoni David B
Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Lang Speech. 2004;47(Pt 3):207-39. doi: 10.1177/00238309040470030101.
Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both groups were asked to categorize new talkers using the same categorization task. While the single-talker group was more accurate during initial training and test phases when familiar talkers produced the sentences, the three-talker group performed better on the generalization task with unfamiliar talkers. This cross-over effect in dialect categorization suggests that while talker variation during initial perceptual learning leads to more difficult learning of specific exemplars, exposure to intertalker variability facilitates robust perceptual learning and promotes better categorization performance of unfamiliar talkers. The results suggest that listeners encode and use acoustic-phonetic variability in speech to reliably perceive the dialect of unfamiliar talkers.
两组听众通过使用从TIMIT语音语料库中选取的句子，学会了根据方言区域对一组不熟悉的说话者进行分类。一组学会对来自六个美国英语方言区域的每个区域的一名说话者进行分类。另一组学会对每个方言区域的三名说话者进行分类。训练后，要求两组使用相同的分类任务对新的说话者进行分类。虽然在初始训练和测试阶段，当熟悉的说话者说出句子时，单说话者组的分类更准确，但三说话者组在对不熟悉的说话者进行泛化任务时表现更好。这种方言分类中的交叉效应表明，虽然初始感知学习期间说话者的变化会导致对特定样本的学习更加困难，但接触说话者之间的变异性有助于强大的感知学习，并促进对不熟悉说话者的更好分类表现。结果表明，听众对语音中的声学语音变异性进行编码并加以利用，以便可靠地感知不熟悉说话者的方言。
