figshare
Browse
plcp_a_1369551_sm6681.docx (14.72 kB)

Sleep facilitates generalisation of accent adaptation to a new talker

Download (14.72 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-30, 06:52 authored by Xin Xie, F. Sayako Earle, Emily B. Myers

Lexically-guided phonetic retuning helps listeners adapt to the phonetic “fingerprint” of a talker. Previous findings show that listeners can generalise from one accented talker to another accented talker, but only for phonetically similar talkers. We tested whether sleep-mediated consolidation promotes generalisation across accented talkers who are not phonetically similar. Native-English participants were trained on a Mandarin-accented talker and tested on this talker and an untrained Mandarin talker. Experiment 1 showed adaptation for the trained talker and a weak transfer to the untrained talker. In Experiment 2, participants were trained and tested either in the morning (Same-Day group) or evening (Overnight group), and again after twelve hours. Both groups retained talker-specific learning over the 12-hour delay. Importantly, the Overnight group showed improvements for the untrained talker, whereas the Same-Day group’s performance on the untrained talker deteriorated. We suggest that sleep facilitated talker generalisation by helping listeners abstract away from specific acoustic properties of the trained talker.

Funding

This research was supported by NIH [grant R01 DC013064] to EBM. The content is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent official views of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [NIDCD].

History