Sidaras Sabrina K, Alexander Jessica E D, Nygaard Lynne C
Department of Psychology, Emory University, 532 Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 May;125(5):3306-16. doi: 10.1121/1.3101452.
Spoken language is characterized by an enormous amount of variability in how linguistic segments are realized. In order to investigate how speech perceptual processes accommodate to multiple sources of variation, adult native speakers of American English were trained with English words or sentences produced by six Spanish-accented talkers. At test, listeners transcribed utterances produced by six familiar or unfamiliar Spanish-accented talkers. With only brief exposure, listeners perceptually adapted to accent-general regularities in spoken language, generalizing to novel accented words and sentences produced by unfamiliar accented speakers. Acoustic properties of vowel production and their relation to identification performance were assessed to determine if the English listeners were sensitive to systematic variation in the realization of accented vowels. Vowels that showed the most improvement after Spanish-accented training were distinct from nearby vowels in terms of their acoustic characteristics. These findings suggest that the speech perceptual system dynamically adjusts to the acoustic consequences of changes in talker's voice and accent.
口语的特点是语言片段的实现方式存在大量变异性。为了研究言语感知过程如何适应多种变异来源，以美国英语为母语的成年人接受了由六位带有西班牙口音的说话者说出的英语单词或句子的训练。在测试中，听众转录了由六位熟悉或不熟悉的带有西班牙口音的说话者说出的话语。仅经过短暂接触，听众就在感知上适应了口语中口音通用的规律，并将其推广到由不熟悉口音的说话者说出的新的带口音单词和句子上。评估了元音发音的声学特性及其与识别表现的关系，以确定以英语为母语的听众是否对带口音元音实现方式的系统变异敏感。在接受西班牙口音训练后改善最为明显的元音在声学特征上与附近的元音不同。这些发现表明，言语感知系统会动态调整以适应说话者声音和口音变化的声学后果。
