PERCEPTUAL ADJUSTMENT TO TIME-COMPRESSED SPEECH - A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY

Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10-15 se ntences, as if their perceptual system was ''adapting'' to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that , for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, exposure to compresse d sentences in either language improves performance on sentences in th e ether language. Experiment 2 reports that Catalan/Spanish transfer o f performance occurs even in monolingual speakers of Spanish who do no t understand Catalan. In Experiment 3, we study another pair of langua ges-namely, English and French-and report no transfer of adaptation be tween these two languages for English-French bilinguals. Experiment 4, with monolingual English speakers, assesses transfer of adaptation fr om French, Dutch, and English toward English. Here we find that there is no adaptation from French and intermediate adaptation from Dutch. W e discuss the locus of the adaptation to compressed speech and relate our findings to other cross-linguistic studies in speech perception.