Phonetic recalibration of speech by text

M. Keetels*, L. Schakel, M. Bonte, J. Vroomen

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Listeners adjust their phonetic categories to cope with variations in the speech signal (phonetic recalibration). Previous studies have shown that lipread speech (and word knowledge) can adjust the perception of ambiguous speech and can induce phonetic adjustments (Bertelson, Vroomen, & de Gelder in Psychological Science, 14(6), 592-597, 2003; Norris, McQueen, & Cutler in Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 204-238, 2003). We examined whether orthographic information (text) also can induce phonetic recalibration. Experiment 1 showed that after exposure to ambiguous speech sounds halfway between /b/ and /d/ that were combined with text (b or d) participants were more likely to categorize auditory-only test sounds in accordance with the exposed letters. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with a very short exposure phase. These results show that listeners adjust their phonetic boundaries in accordance with disambiguating orthographic information and that these adjustments show a rapid build-up.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)938–945
Number of pages8
JournalAttention Perception & Psychophysics
Volume78
Issue number3
Early online date24 Dec 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2016

Keywords

  • Phonetic recalibration
  • Orthographic information
  • Rapid recalibration
  • Letters
  • Speech perception
  • SELECTIVE ADAPTATION
  • AUDITORY SPEECH
  • LIPREAD SPEECH
  • AUDIOVISUAL ASYNCHRONY
  • VISUAL RECALIBRATION
  • PERCEPTION
  • INTEGRATION
  • CATEGORIES
  • SOUNDS
  • IDENTIFICATION

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