Listeners rapidly adapt to current conditions: “Good-enough” adaptation in multitalker speech perception.

Listeners must cope with highly variable input to successfully recognize speech. One way they do this is by adapting to the systematicities of individual talkers. Research on talker-specific adaptation has found that listeners either generalize talker-specific phoneme categories to new talkers or individuate them, creating talker-specific categories. Five experiments investigated the conditions under which listeners generalize or individuate talker-specific phoneme categories using a distributional learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 413) acquired a novel voicing boundary for a new talker and generalized this boundary to another novel talker. In a later session (1-3 days later), they were trained on a second novel talker but showed no evidence of learning it and no evidence of retaining the first talker. Experiment 2 (N = 355) demonstrated that the lack of retention was not a product of interference from learning in the second session. We also asked if listeners individuate talkers when exposed to multiple talkers simultaneously in a distributional learning paradigm (Experiment 3, N = 113) and in a supervised learning paradigm (Experiment 4, N = 125). Neither showed evidence for talker-specific learning. Finally, Experiment 5 (N = 97) demonstrated rapid learning of new categories in as few as 48 trials, which can rapidly be unlearned at test or in a new training block. This argues participants rapidly adapt a set of categories to the current listening environment, but imperfectly, adapting a single boundary to each new talker rather than demonstrating talker-specifically. This good-enough adaptation may be sufficient for everyday needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).