Selective Adaptation in Speech: Measuring the Effects of Visual and Lexical Contexts

Abstract

Speech selective adaptation is a phenomenon in which repeated presentation of a speech stimulus alters subsequent phonetic categorization. Prior work has reported that lexical, but not multisensory, context influences selective adaptation. This dissociation suggests that lexical and multisensory contexts influence speech perception through separate and independent processes (see Samuel & Lieblich, 2014). However, this dissociation is based on results reported by different studies using different stimuli. This leaves open the possibility that the divergent effects of multisensory and lexical contexts on selective adaptation may be the result of idiosyncratic differences in the stimuli rather than separate perceptual processes. The present investigation used a single stimulus set to compare the selective adaptation produced by lexical and multisensory contexts. In contrast to the apparent dissociation in the literature, we find that multisensory information can in fact support selective adaptation.