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COGSCI
2008

The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

14 years 4 days ago
The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent
Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a li...
Jessica Maye, Richard N. Aslin, Michael K. Tanenha
Added 09 Dec 2010
Updated 09 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2008
Where COGSCI
Authors Jessica Maye, Richard N. Aslin, Michael K. Tanenhaus
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