Factors that affect generalization of adaptation
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Date
2023-03-24
Authors
Lee, Dae-yong
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native and non-native speakers is to help non-native speakers improve proficiency in their target language, another way is to help native listeners better understand non-native speech. Specifically, while it may be initially difficult for native listeners to understand non-native speech, the listeners may become better at this skill after short training sessions (i.e., adaptation) and they may better understand novel non-native speakers (i.e., generalization). However, it is not well-understood how native listeners adapt and generalize to a novel speaker. This dissertation investigates how speaker and listener characteristics affect generalization to a novel speaker. Specifically, we examine how acoustic characteristics and talker information interact in generalization of adaptation, how accentedness of non-native speech affects generalization to a novel speaker, and how listeners’ linguistic experience affects generalization of adaptation.
The results suggest that acoustic similarity between speakers may help generalization and that listeners’ reliance on talker information is down-weighted, as long as speakers that listeners are trained with and tested with have similar acoustic characteristics. Furthermore, the results show that exposure to more accented non-native speech disrupts generalization of adaptation compared to exposure to less accented non-native speech, suggesting that having exposure to non-native speakers does not always help generalization. The results also show that having extended linguistic experience with non-native speakers may disrupt generalization to a novel non-native speaker.
The results of the present study have implications for how speaker- and listener-related factors affect generalization of adaptation. Specifically, we suggest that, at least in the early stages of learning, generalization of adaptation is constrained by acoustic similarity and that generalization to a non-native speaker utilizes mechanisms that are general to speech perception, rather than specific to this type of adaptation. We suggest that exposure to non-native accented speech that is too different from the speech that listeners are familiar with may disrupt generalization. Further, we suggest that the representation of non-native accents becomes less malleable with extended linguistic experience.