Predicting foreign-accent adaptation in older adults

Abstract

We investigated comprehension of and adaptation to speech in an unfamiliar accent in older adults. Participants performed a speeded sentence verification task for accented sentences: one group upon auditory-only presentation, and the other group upon audiovisual presentation. Our questions were whether audiovisual presentation would facilitate adaptation to the novel accent, and which cognitive and linguistic measures would predict adaptation. Participants were therefore tested on a range of background tests: hearing acuity, auditory verbal short-term memory, working memory, attention-switching control, selective attention, and vocabulary knowledge. Both auditory-only and audiovisual groups showed improved accuracy and decreasing response times over the course of the experiment, effectively showing accent adaptation. Even though the total amount of improvement was similar for the auditory-only and audiovisual groups, initial rate of adaptation was faster in the audiovisual group. Hearing sensitivity and short-term and working memory measures were associated with efficient processing of the novel accent. Analysis of the relationship between accent comprehension and the background tests revealed furthermore that selective attention and vocabulary size predicted the amount of adaptation over the course of the experiment. These results suggest that vocabulary knowledge and attentional abilities facilitate the attention-shifting strategies proposed to be required for perceptual learning

The role of attentional abilities in lexically guided perceptual learning by older listeners

“…Both for rule-based learning of novel categories (Nosofsky, 1986;Nosofsky, Gluck, Palmeri, McKinly, & Glauthier, 1994) and for learning of an artificial Dutch accent (Janse & Adank, 2012), better selective attention abilities were suggested to lead to better learning. In the context of lexically guided perceptual learning, we suggested that listeners with better selective attention may be drawn to the ambiguity of the target word's final sound, which would reduce the listener's susceptibility to lexically guided perceptual learning.…”

“…This has been shown to have an impact on the recognition of accented speech (Adank & Janse, 2010;Gordon-Salant, YeniKomshian, & Fitzgibbons, 2010a, b;Janse & Adank, 2012). The particular effect of high-frequency hearing loss on lexically guided perceptual learning is however unclear.…”

“…Nosofsky andcollaborators (1986, 1994), for example, suggested that listeners focus on the relevant information in the stimulus and learn to ignore irrelevant dimensions in rule-based learning of novel categories. Indeed, Janse and Adank (2012) found that listeners with better selective attention abilities showed stronger perceptual learning when presented with an artificial Dutch accent in which long vowels were systematically replaced by short vowels and vice versa. They argued that a better ability to pay attention to specific accent details helped to grasp the systematicity of the accent in their study.…”

Listeners' attitudes toward accented talkers uniquely predicts accented speech perception

“…Factors that have been suggested to account for this individual variation include differences in peripheral hearing thresholds (Humes, 2013), differences in receptive vocabulary (Janse and Adank, 2012;McAuliffe et al, 2013), and differences in working memory capacity (Gordon-Salant and Cole, 2016;R€ onnberg et al, 2008).…”

Cognitive basis of individual differences in speech perception, production and representations: The role of domain general attentional switching

“…A growing body of work has focused on the individual differences in the perception of the acoustic cues that define sound contrasts, and shown that this relation may vary as a function of factors such as language background (Escudero & Boersma, 2004;Schertz, Cho, Lotto, & Warner, 2015), cue weighting strategy (Beddor, McGowan, Boland, Coetzee, & Brasher, 2013;Kong & Edwards, 2011), as well as cognitive abilities (e.g. attention: Janse & Adank, 2012; working memory: Francis & Nusbaum, 2009; cognitive processing style: Stewart & Ota, 2008;Yu, 2010). Focusing on native sound contrasts, the purpose of the present investigation was to examine the cognitive factors that give rise to individual differences in perception and production of speech sounds.…”