Bieber R E, Gordon-Salant S
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland College Park, College Park MD, US.
Audit Percept Cogn. 2024;7(2):110-139. doi: 10.1080/25742442.2024.2345568. Epub 2024 Apr 28.
Listeners can rapidly adapt to English speech produced by non-native speakers of English with unfamiliar accents. Prior work has shown that the type and number of talkers contained within a stimulus set may impact rate and magnitude of learning, as well as any generalization of learning. However, findings across the literature have been inconsistent, with relatively little study of these effects in populations of older listeners.
In this study, adaptation and generalization to unfamiliar talkers with familiar and unfamiliar accents are studied in younger normal-hearing adults and older adults with and without hearing loss. Rate and magnitude of adaptation are modelled using both generalized linear mixed effects regression and generalized additive mixed effects modelling.
Rate and magnitude of adaptation were not impacted by increasing the number of talkers and/or varying the consistency of non-native English accents across talkers. Increasing the number of talkers did strengthen generalization of learning for a talker with a familiar non-native accent, but not for an unfamiliar accent. Aging alone did not diminish adaptation or generalization.
These findings support prior evidence of a limited benefit for talker variability in facilitating generalization of learning for non-native accented speech, and extend the findings to older adults.
听众能够迅速适应由非英语母语者用陌生口音说出的英语语音。先前的研究表明，刺激集中包含的说话者类型和数量可能会影响学习的速度和程度，以及学习的任何泛化情况。然而，文献中的研究结果并不一致，对老年听众群体中这些影响的研究相对较少。
在本研究中，对听力正常的年轻成年人以及有听力损失和无听力损失的老年人进行了对带有熟悉和陌生口音的陌生说话者的适应和泛化研究。使用广义线性混合效应回归和广义相加混合效应模型对适应的速度和程度进行建模。
增加说话者的数量和/或改变说话者之间非英语母语口音的一致性，并不会影响适应的速度和程度。增加说话者的数量确实增强了对带有熟悉非英语母语口音的说话者的学习泛化，但对陌生口音的说话者则没有。仅衰老本身并不会削弱适应或泛化能力。
这些发现支持了先前的证据，即说话者变异性在促进对非英语母语口音语音的学习泛化方面益处有限，并将这些发现扩展到了老年人。
