Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Rapid adaptation doesn’t mean automatic perception: a non-native accent study
Poster E77 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Dario Fuentes1, Nina Kazanina1,2; 1University of Bristol, 2Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Non-native speech may present challenges to native listeners as it contains phonetic irregularities. For example, Spanish speakers pronounce English /p/ without aspiration which makes it confusable with a /b/ for a native English listener. Yet, listeners are able to overcome this problem by adapting to this and other non-native accent features. Based on previous studies that explored non-native accent adaptation using transcription tasks (Bradlow & Bent, 2008; Tzeng et al., 2016), we developed a series of experiments that explored how listeners’ adaptation to non-native accents changes perception at the sublexical level. English listeners were exposed to the speech of a Chilean speaker of English through sentences; then their adaptation to specific non-native sounds (e.g. unaspirated /p*/) was subsequently tested using a sound identification task where participants were asked to classify certain words depending on their initial consonant. In previous research, we found evidence of listeners’ adaptation at the sublexical level, i.e. sensitivity to non-native sounds increased with increasing exposure. In an EEG study that is currently underway, we investigate whether adaptation involves changes in the automaticity of non-native accent perception. We are using a combination of an oddball paradigm with Fast Periodic Auditory Stimulation (FPAS), a technique used to explore passive and automatic perception (Barbero et al., 2021). During this task, the participants’ ability to perceive non-native phonological contrasts was tested using a stream of syllables (e.g. prevoiced /b/ v/s unaspirated /p*/ in [ba-ba-ba-ba-pa*-ba-ba…]). To ensure listeners' attention, participants were instructed to press a button when a control syllable was presented (e.g. /ma/ in [ba-ma-ba-ba-pa*-ba-ba…]). Our results so far show evidence of accent adaptation in the behavioural tasks, mirroring our previous findings, but not in the FPAS-oddball task. This pattern suggests that when listeners undergo non-native accent adaptation, their perceptual retuning towards non-native sublexical units is a result of a process that is active and controlled rather than automatic. Barbero, F. M., Calce, R. P., Talwar, S., & Rossion, B. (2021). Fast Periodic Auditory Stimulation Reveals a Robust Categorical Response to Voices in the Human Brain. 8(June), 1–13. Bradlow, A. R., & Bent, T. (2008). Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech. Cognition, 106(2008), 707–729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.04.005 Tzeng, C. Y., Alexander, J. E. D., Sidaras, S. K., & Nygaard, L. C. (2016). The role of training structure in perceptual learning of accented speech. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(11), 1793–1805. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000260
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Phonology