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Purpose:This study examined the race identification of Southern American English speakers from two geographically distant regions in North Carolina. The purpose of this work is to explore how talkers' self-identified race, talker dialect region, and acoustic speech variables contribute to listener categorization of talker races. Method:Two groups of listeners heard a series of /h/–vowel–/d/ (/hVd/) words produced by Black and White talkers from East and West North Carolina, respectively. Results:Both Southern (North Carolina) and Midland (Indiana) listeners accurately categorized the race of all speakers with greater-than-chance accuracy; however, Western North Carolina Black talkers were categorized with the lowest accuracy, just above chance. Conclusions:The results suggest that similarities in the speech production patterns of West North Carolina Black and White talkers affect the racial categorization of Black, but not White talkers. The results are discussed with respect to the acoustic spectral features of the voices present in the sample population. 

IntroductionListeners rapidly “tune” to unfamiliar accented speech, and some evidence also suggests that they may improve over multiple days of exposure. The present study aimed to measure accommodation of unfamiliar second language- (L2-) accented speech over a consecutive 5-day period using both a measure of listening performance (speech recognition accuracy) and a measure of cognitive load (a dual-task paradigm). MethodsAll subjects completed a dual-task paradigm with L1 and L2 accent on Days 1 and 5, and were given brief exposure to either L1 (control group) or unfamiliar L2 (training groups) accent on Days 2–4. One training group was exposed to the L2 accent via a standard speech transcription task while the other was exposed to the L2 accent via a transcription task that included implicit feedback (i.e., showing the correct answer after each trial). ResultsAlthough overall improvement in listening performance and reduction in cognitive load were observed from Days 1 to 5, our results indicated neither a larger benefit for the L2 accent training groups compared to the control group nor a difference based on the implicit feedback manipulation. DiscussionWe conclude that the L2 accent trainings implemented in the present study did not successfully promote long-term learning benefits of a statistically meaningful magnitude, presenting our findings as a methodologically informative starting point for future research on this topic. 

Learning to perform a perceptual decision task is generally achieved through sessions of effortful practice with feedback. Here, we investigated how passive exposure to task-relevant stimuli, which is relatively effortless and does not require feedback, influences active learning. First, we trained mice in a sound-categorization task with various schedules combining passive exposure and active training. Mice that received passive exposure exhibited faster learning, regardless of whether this exposure occurred entirely before active training or was interleaved between active sessions. We next trained neural-network models with different architectures and learning rules to perform the task. Networks that use the statistical properties of stimuli to enhance separability of the data via unsupervised learning during passive exposure provided the best account of the behavioral observations. We further found that, during interleaved schedules, there is an increased alignment between weight updates from passive exposure and active training, such that a few interleaved sessions can be as effective as schedules with long periods of passive exposure before active training, consistent with our behavioral observations. These results provide key insights for the design of efficient training schedules that combine active learning and passive exposure in both natural and artificial systems. 

Purpose:Numerous tasks have been developed to measure receptive vocabulary, many of which were designed to be administered in person with a trained researcher or clinician. The purpose of the current study is to compare a common, in-person test of vocabulary with other vocabulary assessments that can be self-administered. Method:Fifty-three participants completed the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) via online video call to mimic in-person administration, as well as four additional fully automated, self-administered measures of receptive vocabulary. Participants also completed three control tasks that do not measure receptive vocabulary. Results:Pearson correlations indicated moderate correlations among most of the receptive vocabulary measures (approximatelyr= .50–.70). As expected, the control tasks revealed only weak correlations to the vocabulary measures. However, subsets of items of the four self-administered measures of receptive vocabulary achieved high correlations with the PPVT (r> .80). These subsets were found through a repeated resampling approach. Conclusions:Measures of receptive vocabulary differ in which items are included and in the assessment task (e.g., lexical decision, picture matching, synonym matching). The results of the current study suggest that several self-administered tasks are able to achieve high correlations with the PPVT when a subset of items are scored, rather than the full set of items. These data provide evidence that subsets of items on one behavioral assessment can more highly correlate to another measure. In practical terms, these data demonstrate that self-administered, automated measures of receptive vocabulary can be used as reasonable substitutes of at least one test (PPVT) that requires human interaction. That several of the fully automated measures resulted in high correlations with the PPVT suggests that different tasks could be selected depending on the needs of the researcher. It is important to note the aim was not to establish clinical relevance of these measures, but establish whether researchers could use an experimental task of receptive vocabulary that probes a similar construct to what is captured by the PPVT, and use these measures of individual differences. 

Language learners often transfer the sounds and prosody of their native language into their second language, but this influence can also flow in the opposite direction, with the second language influencing the first. Among other variables, language proficiency is known to affect the degree and directionality of cross-linguistic influence. However, little is known about how second language learning affects listeners’ perception of their native language. To begin addressing this gap, we examined the relationship between learners’ second language proficiency and their category goodness ratings in their native language. Thirty-nine English-speaking learners of Spanish listened to English words that began with voiced and voiceless stop consonants and were asked to rate how well the word represented the intended word on a 5-point scale. To create a voicing continuum, we manipulated the voice onset time of the word-initial stop in each target item from 125 ms of prevoicing to 100 ms of aspiration, in 25 ms steps. Proficiency did not affect the perception of voiced targets, but both proficiency and L2 stop production affected the perception of voiceless targets. 

Intelligibility measures, which assess the number of words or phonemes a listener correctly transcribes or repeats, are commonly used metrics for speech perception research. While these measures have many benefits for researchers, they also come with a number of limitations. By pointing out the strengths and limitations of this approach, including how it fails to capture aspects of perception such as listening effort, this article argues that the role of intelligibility measures must be reconsidered in fields such as linguistics, communication disorders, and psychology. Recommendations for future work in this area are presented.