Abstract
Foreign-accented speech can be difficult to understand but listeners can adapt to novel talkers and accents with appropriate experience. Previous studies have demonstrated talker-independent but accent-dependent learning after training on multiple talkers from a single language background. Here, listeners instead were exposed to talkers from five language backgrounds during training. After training, listeners generalized their learning to novel talkers from language backgrounds both included and not included in the training set. These findings suggest that generalization of foreign-accent adaptation is the result of exposure to systematic variability in accented speech that is similar across talkers from multiple language backgrounds.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | EL174-EL180 |
Journal | journal of the Acoustical Society of America |
Volume | 133 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2013 |
Funding
The work was supported by NIH-NIDCD (No. R01-DC005794 to A.R.B.; No. R01-DC004453 to B.A.W.) and a Northwestern University Cognitive Science Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Research Projects to M.M.B.-B. We thank Dan Sanes for his help in preparing the final figures.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Acoustics and Ultrasonics