Shaping perceptual learning of synthetic speech through feedback

Listeners exposed to accented speech must adjust how they map between acoustic features and lexical representations such as phonetic categories. A robust form of this adaptive perceptual learning is learning to perceive synthetic speech where the connections between acoustic features and phonetic categories must be updated. Both implicit learning through mere exposure and explicit learning through directed feedback have previously been shown to produce this type of adaptive learning. The present study crosses implicit exposure and explicit feedback with the presence or absence of a written identification task. We show that simple exposure produces some learning, but explicit feedback produces substantially stronger learning, whereas requiring written identification did not measurably affect learning. These results suggest that explicit feedback guides learning of new mappings between acoustic patterns and known phonetic categories. We discuss mechanisms that may support learning via implicit exposure.