Dahan Delphine, Drucker Sarah J, Scarborough Rebecca A
Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104-6228, USA.
Cognition. 2008 Sep;108(3):710-8. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.06.003. Epub 2008 Jul 23.
Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /ae/ is raised before /g/, but not before /k/. Results from two experiments showed that listeners' identification of /k/-final words like back (which are unaffected by the dialect) was facilitated by prior exposure to their dialect-affected /g/-final counterparts, e.g., bag. This facilitation occurred because the competition between interpretations, e.g., bag or back, while hearing the initial portion of the input [bae], was mitigated by the reduced probability for the input to correspond to bag as produced by this talker. Thus, adaptation to an accent is not just a matter of adjusting the speech signal as it is being heard; adaptation involves dynamic adjustment of the representations stored in the lexicon, according to the characteristics of the speaker or the context.
过去的研究已经证实，听众在理解语言时能够适应各种各样的说话者。然而，这种调整是如何进行的，仍是一个有争议的问题。在这里，听众接触到一位说美国英语方言的说话者所说的单词，在这种方言中，元音/ae/在/g/之前会升高，但在/k/之前不会。两项实验的结果表明，听众对像back这样以/k/结尾的单词（不受该方言影响）的识别，会因之前接触过受该方言影响的以/g/结尾的对应单词（如bag）而得到促进。这种促进的发生是因为在听到输入的初始部分[bae]时，例如bag或back之间的解释竞争，由于输入对应于该说话者所说的bag的可能性降低而得到缓解。因此，对口音的适应不仅仅是在听到语音信号时对其进行调整；适应还涉及根据说话者的特征或语境，对存储在词汇表中的表征进行动态调整。
