Lexically guided retuning of letter perception.

Positional effects in the lexical retuning of speech perception.

Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Dutch listeners learn to interpret an ambiguous sound between /s/ and /f/ as /f/ if they hear it word-finally in Dutch words normally ending in /f/, but as /s/ if they hear it in normally /s/-final words. Here, we examined two positional effects in lexically guided retuning. In Experiment 1, ambiguous sounds du...

Perceptual retuning targets features

Introduction Previous work has shown that listeners systematically “retune” their categorical boundaries when presented with real-word tokens containing an ambiguous segment. There have been multiple previous studies on this lexically-guided retuning (Jesse and McQueen 2011; McQueen et al. 2006; Norris et al. 2003), but most work thus far has assumed that the retuning is at the level of the seg...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance Lexically Guided Phonetic Retuning of Foreign-Accented Speech and Its Generalization

Comparing lexically guided perceptual learning in younger and older listeners.

Numerous studies have shown that younger adults engage in lexically guided perceptual learning in speech perception. Here, we investigated whether older listeners are also able to retune their phonetic category boundaries. More specifically, in this research we tried to answer two questions. First, do older adults show perceptual-learning effects of similar size to those of younger adults? Seco...

Lexically guided phonetic retuning of foreign-accented speech and its generalization.

Listeners use lexical knowledge to retune phoneme categories. When hearing an ambiguous sound between /s/ and /f/ in lexically unambiguous contexts such as gira[s/f], listeners learn to interpret the sound as /f/ because gira[f] is a real word and gira[s] is not. Later, they apply this learning even in lexically ambiguous contexts (perceiving knife rather than nice). Although such retuning coul...