Perceptual adjustment to foreign-accented English

A central goal of speech research is to understand how the speech perception system handles variability. Previous work on variability due to differences in speakers’ voices has demonstrated that experience with a voice facilitates word intelligibility L. C. Nygaard and D. B. Pisoni, Percept. Psychophys. 60, 355–376 (1998). The present study investigated whether a more abstract feature of voices, such as foreign accent, can also be perceptually learned and utilized in perception. The following question was tested: Does experience with an accent generalize to the perception of a new voice with the same accent? Two groups were trained with English sentences produced by either Spanish- or Chinese-accented voices. Both groups were then given a word intelligibility test in which sentences were presented in noise. Test sentences included both familiar and new Spanish- and Chinese-accented voices. Training improved intelligibility of familiar voices but did not affect perception of new voices with the trained accents. Results indicate that experience with an accent does not improve perception of a new voice with the same accent. Perceptual learning seems to be restricted to individual voices. Results are discussed with respect to current theories of speech perception. Work supported by NSF.