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Listeners rapidly adapt to current conditions: "Good-enough" adaptation in multitalker speech perception
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Listeners rapidly adapt to current conditions: "Good-enough" adaptation in multitalker speech perception

Samantha L Chiu, Cheyenne M Toscano, Joseph C Toscano and Bob McMurray
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Vol.154(11), pp.3162-3194
11/2025
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001797
PMCID: PMC13225674
PMID: 41213575

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Abstract

Listeners must cope with highly variable input to successfully recognize speech. One way they do this is by adapting to the systematicities of individual talkers. Research on talker-specific adaptation has found that listeners either generalize talker-specific phoneme categories to new talkers or individuate them, creating talker-specific categories. Five experiments investigated the conditions under which listeners generalize or individuate talker-specific phoneme categories using a distributional learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 413) acquired a novel voicing boundary for a new talker and generalized this boundary to another novel talker. In a later session (1-3 days later), they were trained on a second novel talker but showed no evidence of learning it and no evidence of retaining the first talker. Experiment 2 (N = 355) demonstrated that the lack of retention was not a product of interference from learning in the second session. We also asked if listeners individuate talkers when exposed to multiple talkers simultaneously in a distributional learning paradigm (Experiment 3, N = 113) and in a supervised learning paradigm (Experiment 4, N = 125). Neither showed evidence for talker-specific learning. Finally, Experiment 5 (N = 97) demonstrated rapid learning of new categories in as few as 48 trials, which can rapidly be unlearned at test or in a new training block. This argues participants rapidly adapt a set of categories to the current listening environment, but imperfectly, adapting a single boundary to each new talker rather than demonstrating talker-specifically. This good-enough adaptation may be sufficient for everyday needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
 Adaptation, Psychological - physiology Adolescent Adult Female Humans Learning - physiology Male Phonetics Speech Perception - physiology Young Adult

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