Lexically guided retuning of visual phonetic categories.

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...

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

The effect of non-nativeness and background noise on lexical retuning

Previous research revealed remarkable flexibility of native and non-native listeners’ perceptual system, i.e., native and non-native phonetic category boundaries can be quickly recalibrated in the face of ambiguous input. The present study investigates the limitations of the flexibility of the non-native perceptual system. In two lexically-guided perceptual learning experiments, Dutch listeners...

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...

Can litheners retune native categories acroth a thoneme boundary?

Lexically guided perceptual retuning studies have demonstrated that listeners use their knowledge of phonemes in words to accommodate to artificially generated sounds that are halfway between two phonemes. However, it is unknown whether listeners accommodate in the same way when words are pronounced with an incorrect native phoneme (e.g., flower pronounced as “thlower”). Monolingual Australian-...