Abstract
Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10–15 sentences, as if their perceptual system was “adapting” to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that, for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, exposure to compressed sentences in either language improves performance on sentences in the other language. Experiment 2 reports that Catalan/Spanish transfer of performance occurs even in monolingual speakers of Spanish who do not understand Catalan. In Experiment 3, we study another pair of languages— namely, English and French—and report no transfer of adaptation between these two languages for English—French bilinguals. Experiment 4, with monolingual English speakers, assesses transfer of adaptation from French, Dutch, and English toward English. Here we find that there is no adaptation from French and intermediate adaptation from Dutch. We discuss the locus of the adaptation to compressed speech and relate our findings to other cross-linguistic studies in speech perception.
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This research was supported by grants from the Human Frontier Science Program, the Human Capital Program of the EEC, the Franco-Spanish Exchange Program for 1993–1995, and the Fyssen Foundation. The first version of this paper was written while Christophe Pallier was a postdoc researcher at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, New Brunswick, NJ. We thank Peter Golato for help in data gathering, William Marslen-Wilson and Suzanne Howard at the Center for Speech and Language at Birkbeck College, and John Morton at the Cognitive Development Unit, MRC, for letting us use their facilities to test English subjects (Experiment 4).
—Accepted by previous editor, Geoffrey R. Loftus
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Pallier, C., Sebastian-Gallés, N., Dupoux, E. et al. Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study. Memory & Cognition 26, 844–851 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211403
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211403