The weckud wetch of the wast: lexical adaptation to a novel accent |
| |
Authors: | Maye Jessica Aslin Richard N Tanenhaus Michael K |
| |
Affiliation: | Northwestern University and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems;University of Rochester |
| |
Abstract: | Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker. |
| |
Keywords: | Speech perception Perceptual adaptation Word recognition Accent Dialect |
本文献已被 PubMed 等数据库收录! |