Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, USA.
Cognition. 2011 Apr;119(1):131-6. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.018. Epub 2010 Dec 8.
Phonetic variation has been considered a barrier that listeners must overcome in speech perception, but has been proved beneficial in category learning. In this paper, I show that listeners use within-speaker variation to accommodate gross categorical variation. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p-initial words in English produced by a native speaker of French. Critically, listeners are trained on these words with either invariant or highly-variable VOTs. While a gross boundary shift is made for participants exposed to the variable VOTs, no such shift is observed after exposure to the invariant stimuli. These data suggest that increasing variation improves the mapping of perceptually mismatched stimuli.
语音变异一直被认为是听众在言语感知中必须克服的障碍，但已被证明对类别学习有益。在本文中，我表明听众会利用说话者内的变异性来适应类别上的巨大变化。在感知学习范式中，听众会接触到由法语母语者说出的以 p 开头的英语单词。关键是，听众可以根据不变或高度变化的 VOT 来接受这些单词的训练。虽然接触可变 VOT 的参与者会发生明显的边界转移，但接触不变刺激的参与者则没有观察到这种转移。这些数据表明，增加变异性可以改善感知不匹配刺激的映射。
