Effect of selective adaptation on the identification of speech sounds
Randy L. Diehl · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1974
An experiment was performed to determine the effect of selective adaptation on the identification of synthetic speech sounds which varied along the phonetic dimension place of articulation. Adaptation with a stimulus of a particular place value led to a reduction in the number of test stimuli identified as having that place value. An identification shift was obtained even when the acoustic information specifying place value for the adapting stimulus (burst-cued) had little in common with the information specifying place value for any of the test stimuli (transition-cued). Removing the vowel portion of an adapting stimulus eliminated identification shift only when the resulting stimulus was no longer perceived as speechlike. The results indicate that at least part of the adaptation effect occurs at a site of phonetic, nor merely acoustic, feature analysis.