Effects of language experience on domain-general perceptual strategies

Jasmin, Kyle, Sun, Hui and Tierney, Adam T. 2021. Effects of language experience on domain-general perceptual strategies. Cognition 206 , 104481. 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104481

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Abstract

Speech and music are highly redundant communication systems, with multiple acoustic cues signaling the existence of perceptual categories. This redundancy makes these systems robust to the influence of noise, but necessitates the development of perceptual strategies: listeners need to decide how much importance to place on each source of information. Prior empirical work and modeling has suggested that cue weights primarily reflect within-task statistical learning, as listeners assess the reliability with which different acoustic dimensions signal a category and modify their weights accordingly. Here we present evidence that perceptual experience can lead to changes in cue weighting that extend across tasks and across domains, suggesting that perceptual strategies reflect both global biases and local (i.e. task-specific) learning. In two experiments, native speakers of Mandarin (N = 45)—where pitch is a crucial cue to word identity—placed more importance on pitch and less importance on other dimensions compared to native speakers of non-tonal languages English (N = 45) and Spanish (N = 27), during the perception of both English speech and musical beats. In a third experiment, we further show that Mandarin speakers are better able to attend to pitch and ignore irrelevant variation in other dimensions in speech compared to English and Spanish speakers, and even struggle to ignore pitch when asked to attend to other dimensions. Thus, an individual's idiosyncratic auditory perceptual strategy reflects a complex mixture of congenital predispositions, task-specific learning, and biases instilled by extensive experience in making use of important dimensions in their native language.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0010-0277
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 September 2022
Date of Acceptance:	26 September 2020
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2023 14:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152867

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