Week 6 reading

Speech perception, social influences on phonetic adaptation

The plan for week 6

This week we are looking at Lev-Ari (2017). This paper reports an online perceptual learning experiment, where participants are exposed to manipulated speech (featuring weird /d/ or /t/ phonemes with an unusual Voice Onset Time, VOT) and then tested on a categorization task where they hear words spoken by the same speaker or a new speaker featuring ambiguous /d/-/t/ sounds and have to categorise those sounds as /d/ or /t/. The basic result is that the manipulated speech input influences how those sounds are perceived; the interesting new twist is that the level of phonetic adaptation appears to depend on the participants’ social network size, with individuals with small social networks being more strongly influenced by the manipulated speech. As usual, in this week’s practical you’ll get a chance to look at a similar experiment in jsPsych, which will give you some experience of dealing with audio stimuli.

Reading tasks for this week

Read:

Just as a footnote: I actually edited this paper for PLoS ONE, which means it was assigned to me by the journal and I solicited reviews from other researchers, requested revisions to the paper, and made a final decision on the paper based on another round of revision.

As you read this paper make notes of any questions, criticisms or ideas it gives you, and I’ll leave time in the Monday lecture slot so we can discuss these in class.

A couple of things to note as you work through the paper (basically trying to clarify things that take me a few minutes to figure out every time I read this paper!):

Re-use

All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


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