Labels facilitate the learning of competing abstract perceptual mappings

Abstract

Listeners are able to quickly adapt to synthetic speech, even though it contains misleading and degraded acoustic information. Previous research has shown that testing and training on a given synthesizer using only novel words leads listeners to form abstract or generalized knowledge for how that particular synthesizer maps different acoustic patterns onto their pre-existing phonological categories. Prior to consolidation, this knowledge has been shown to be susceptible to interference. Given that labels have been argued to stabilize abstract ideas in working memory and to help learners form category representations that are robust against interference, we examined how learning for a given synthesizer is affected by labeled or unlabeled immediate training on an additional synthesizer, which uses a different acoustic to phonetic mapping. We demonstrated that the learning of an additional synthesizer interferes with the retention of a previously learned synthesizer but that this is ameliorated if the additional synthesizer is labeled. Our findings indicate that labeling may be important in facilitating daytime learning for competing abstract perceptual mappings prior to consolidation and suggests that speech perception may be best understood through the lens of perceptual categorization.