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Tan, M., Xie, X., & Jaeger, T. F. (2021) Using rational models to interpret the results of experiments on accent adaption. Frontiers.
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Description: Exposure to unfamiliar non-native speech tends to improve comprehension. One hypothesis holds that listeners adapt to non-native-accented speech through distributional learning---by inferring the statistics of the talker's phonetic cues. Models based on this hypothesis provide a good fit to incremental changes after exposure to atypical native speech. These models have, however, not previously been applied to non-native accents, which typically differ from native speech in many dimensions. Motivated by a seeming failure to replicate a well-replicated finding from accent adaptation, we use ideal observers to test whether our results can be understood solely based on the statistics of the relevant cue distributions in the native- and non-native-accented speech. The simple computational model we use for this purpose can be used predictively by other researchers working on similar questions. All code and data are shared.
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