Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, New York, NY, USA.
Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2023 Oct;85(7):2437-2458. doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02725-1. Epub 2023 Jun 1.
The speech perception system adjusts its phoneme categories based on the current speech input and lexical context. This is known as lexically driven perceptual recalibration, and it is often assumed to underlie accommodation to non-native accented speech. However, recalibration studies have focused on maximally ambiguous sounds (e.g., a sound ambiguous between "sh" and "s" in a word like "superpower"), a scenario that does not represent the full range of variation present in accented speech. Indeed, non-native speakers sometimes completely substitute a phoneme for another, rather than produce an ambiguous segment (e.g., saying "shuperpower"). This has been called a "bad map" in the literature. In this study, we scale up the lexically driven recalibration paradigm to such cases. Because previous research suggests that the position of the critically accented phoneme modulates the success of recalibration, we include such a manipulation in our study. And to ensure that participants treat all critical items as words (an important point for successful recalibration), we use a new exposure task that incentivizes them to do so. Our findings suggest that while recalibration is most robust after exposure to ambiguous sounds, it also occurs after exposure to bad maps. But interestingly, positional effects may be reversed: recalibration was more likely for ambiguous sounds late in words, but more likely for bad maps occurring early in words. Finally, a comparison of an online versus in-lab version of these conditions shows that experimental setting may have a non-trivial effect on the results of recalibration studies.
言语感知系统会根据当前的言语输入和词汇语境调整音位类别。这被称为词汇驱动的感知再校准，它通常被认为是对非母语口音言语的适应的基础。然而，再校准研究集中在最大程度上的歧义音（例如，在“superpower”一词中，介于“sh”和“s”之间的音）上，这种情况并不能代表口音言语中存在的全部变化范围。事实上，非母语说话者有时会完全用一个音位替代另一个音位，而不是产生一个歧义的音段（例如，说“shuperpower”）。这在文献中被称为“不良映射”。在这项研究中，我们将词汇驱动的再校准范式扩展到这种情况。由于先前的研究表明，关键重音音位的位置会调节再校准的成功，我们在研究中包括了这样的操作。并且为了确保参与者将所有关键项目视为单词（这是成功再校准的一个重要点），我们使用了一种新的暴露任务来激励他们这样做。我们的研究结果表明，虽然在接触歧义音后再校准最有效，但在接触不良映射后也会发生再校准。但有趣的是，位置效应可能会反转：在单词的后半部分，歧义音的再校准可能性更大，但在单词的前半部分，不良映射的再校准可能性更大。最后，对这些条件的在线与实验室版本进行比较表明，实验设置可能对再校准研究的结果产生重要影响。
