Perceptual adaptation to sinewave‐vocoded speech across languages.

Abstract

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation (e.g., acoustic, phonetic, lexical, syntactic), however, remains an open question. In the present study, three groups of listeners were passively exposed to sinewave‐vocoded speech in one of three languages (English, German, or Mandarin) to manipulate the level(s) of information shared between the training languages and testing language (English). Two additional groups were also included to control for procedural learning effects. One control group received no training, while the other control group was trained with spectrally rotated English materials. After training, all listeners transcribed eight‐channel sinewave‐vocoded English sentences. The results demonstrated that listeners exposed to German materials performed equivalently to listeners exposed to English materials. However, listeners exposed to Mandarin materials showed an intermediate level of performance; their scores were not significant...