Huyck Julia Jones, Smith Rachel H, Hawkins Sarah, Johnsrude Ingrid S
Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2017 Nov 9;60(11):3334-3341. doi: 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-H-16-0300.
We investigated whether perceptual learning of noise-vocoded (NV) speech is specific to a particular talker or accent.
Four groups of listeners (n = 18 per group) were first trained by listening to 20 NV sentences that had been recorded by a talker with either the same native accent as the listeners or a different regional accent. They then heard 20 novel NV sentences from either the native- or nonnative-accented talker (test), in a 2 × 2 (Training Talker per Accent × Test Talker per Accent) design.
Word-report scores at test for participants trained and tested with the same (native- or nonnative-accented) talker did not differ from those for participants trained with 1 talker per accent and tested on another.
Learning of NV speech generalized completely between talkers. Two additional experiments confirmed this result. Thus, when listeners are trained to understand NV speech, they are not learning talker- or accent-specific features but instead are learning how to use the information available in the degraded signal. The results suggest that people with cochlear implants, who experience spectrally degraded speech, may not be too disadvantaged if they learn to understand speech through their implant by listening primarily to just 1 other talker, such as a spouse.
我们研究了噪声编码（NV）语音的感知学习是否特定于某个特定的说话者或口音。
四组听众（每组n = 18）首先通过聆听由具有与听众相同母语口音或不同地区口音的说话者录制的20个NV句子进行训练。然后，他们在2×2（每个口音的训练说话者×每个口音的测试说话者）设计中，从母语或非母语口音的说话者那里听到20个新的NV句子（测试）。
用相同（母语或非母语口音）说话者进行训练和测试的参与者在测试时的单词报告分数，与每个口音用1个说话者训练并在另一个说话者上进行测试的参与者的分数没有差异。
NV语音的学习在说话者之间完全可以推广。另外两个实验证实了这一结果。因此，当听众接受训练以理解NV语音时，他们不是在学习特定于说话者或口音的特征，而是在学习如何利用降级信号中可用的信息。结果表明，对于经历频谱降级语音的人工耳蜗植入者来说，如果他们主要通过聆听另一个说话者（如配偶）来学习通过植入物理解语音，可能不会处于太不利的地位。
