Gradient phoneme categorization helps listeners recover from mispronunciations

What is it about?

This study examined the role of individual differences in speech perception. Participants were asked to report their perception of speech sounds on a continuous scale (e.g., from bin to pin). In addition, we collected a number of other measures in order to assess how they process spoken language. Our results show that individuals differ in how sensitive they are to fine acoustic information (i.e., some can discriminate better between two different occurrences of bin). Such acoustic details are commonly considered noise that listeners should ignore. However, our results show that individuals who are more sensitive to such information are better in comprehending ambiguous utterances. In other words, maintaining ambiguity, whenever it exists, allows for more flexible speech perception. This finding goes against the common idea that efficient speech perception depends on discrete, step-like categorization of speech sounds.

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