Attentional resources contribute to the perceptual learning of talker idiosyncrasies in audiovisual speech

Do They Know It's Christmash? Lexical Knowledge Directly Impacts Speech Perception

We recently reported strong, replicable (i.e., replicated) evidence for lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC; Luthra et al., 2021), whereby lexical knowledge influences a prelexical process. Critically, evidence for LCfC provides robust support for interactive models of cognition that include top-down feedback and is inconsistent with autonomous models that allow only feedforward processing. McQueen, Jesse, and Mitterer (2023) offer five counter-arguments against our interpretation; we respond to each of those arguments here and conclude that top-down feedback provides the most parsimonious explanation of extant data.

Boosting lexical support does not enhance lexically guided perceptual learning

A challenge for listeners is to learn the appropriate mapping between acoustics and phonetic categories for an individual talker. Lexically guided perceptual learning (LGPL) studies have shown that listeners can leverage lexical knowledge to guide this process. For instance, listeners learn to interpret ambiguous /s/-/∫/ blends as /s/ if they have previously encountered them in /s/-biased contexts like epi?ode. Here, we examined whether the degree of preceding lexical support might modulate the extent of perceptual learning. In Experiment 1, we first demonstrated that perceptual learning could be obtained in a modified LGPL paradigm where listeners were first biased to interpret ambiguous tokens as one phoneme (e.g., /s/) and then later as another (e.g., /∫/). In subsequent experiments, we tested whether the extent of learning differed depending on whether targets encountered predictive contexts or neutral contexts prior to the auditory target (e.g., epi?ode). Experiment 2 used auditory sentence contexts (e.g., "I love The Walking Dead and eagerly await every new . . ."), whereas Experiment 3 used written sentence contexts. In Experiment 4, participants did not receive sentence contexts but rather saw the written form of the target word (episode) or filler text (＃＃＃＃＃＃＃＃) prior to hearing the critical auditory token. While we consistently observed effects of context on in-the-moment processing of critical words, the size of the learning effect was not modulated by the type of context. We hypothesize that boosting lexical support through preceding context may not strongly influence perceptual learning when ambiguous speech sounds can be identified solely from lexical information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).