LING Colloquium: Lori Holt (CMU)

Online regularities and prior knowledge conspire to shape speech perception

Abstract: Across cognitive domains, successful behavior tends to require that systems strike a balance between stability and plasticity. On the one hand, there is a need to align behavior with long-term regularities -- such as the speech patterns of a native language community. On the other hand, short-term input sometimes departs from these long-term patterns – such as in encountering a talker with accented speech. I will share a program of research that aims to understand more about how speech perception strikes this balance. In preview, the studies I will share demonstrate rapid flexibility in the mapping of speech input, graded sensitivity to short-term regularities, the ability to track multiple regularities, and individual differences that reveal mechanistic bases for this rapid learning. I will argue that knowledge of the canonical mapping of acoustic input to native-language speech categories conspires with short-term input regularities to trigger rapid adjustments in the mapping of acoustics to speech categories at a pre-lexical level.