Date of Completion
Spring 5-2-2014
Thesis Advisor(s)
Emily B. Myers; Rachel M. Theodore
Honors Major
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
Disciplines
Cognition and Perception | Cognitive Neuroscience | Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
Abstract
Previous research has found that perceptual learning, or normalizing the idiosyncratic phonemes of speech, causes a shift in speech sound category boundaries. The present study examined if perceptual learning was limited to the boundary or if also caused a shift in internal category structure. Seventeen individuals participated in three behavioral tasks to explicate this question. In the Lexical Decision task, participants were trained in either /s/-biasing or /ʃ/- biasing context. In the Goodness Judgment task, participants rated a continuum of sounds on perceived /s/ goodness using a designated scale. Finally, in the Phoneme Identification task, participants listened to the same continuum previously heard but were asked to classify the token as /s/ or /ʃ/. Results suggest a shift in internal category structure, which is consistent with the view that top down processing results in a shift in the perception of within category variation. Future studies seek to further explicate this question by examining the perceptual learning mechanism in language-impaired populations.
Recommended Citation
Drouin, Julia R., "The New Normal: Goodness Judgments of Non-Invariant Speech" (2014). Honors Scholar Theses. 363.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/363