Simple and contingent adaptation effects in speech perception
David B. Pisoni, James R. Sawusch, F. T. Adams · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1975
We report three experiments that employed a contingent adaptation procedure to study the interactions between auditory and phonetic processes. In this procedure, two alternating stimuli are presented as adaptors and their combined effects on perception can be studied. Experiment I examined the voicing feature in stop consonants and replicated previous findings indicating that adaptation of voicing takes place in a vowel-dependent manner. Two other experiments extended the contingent procedure to an analysis of the place feature. In one experiment simple and contingent adaptation were studied in order to show that the effects obtained with single adaptors can be canceled by the presentation of a contingent sequence containing identical vowels. Finally, in another experiment, the vowel context of the contingent adaptors and test series was manipulated. Differential adaptation effects were observed for two separate place series. The direction of the shifts in each series was governed by the vowel context of the adapting syllables indicating that selective adaptation of the place feature is also carried out in a vowel dependent manner. The results of these contingent adaptation experiments suggest that a large component of the selective adaptation effect takes place at an auditory stage of perceptual processing prior to phonetic analysis. [Research supported by NINCDS Grant NS-12179.]