Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech perception is made much harder by variability betweentalkers. As a result, listeners need to adapt to each differenttalker’s particular acoustic cue distributions. Thinking of thisadaptation as a form of statistical inference, we explore the rolethat listeners’ prior expectations play in adapting to an unfa-miliar talker. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that listenerswill have a harder time adapting to talkers whose cue distribu-tions fall outside the range of normal variation across talkers.We also show that it is possible to infer listeners’ shared priorexpectations based on patterns of adaptation to different cuedistributions. This provides a potentially powerful tool for di-rectly probing listeners’ prior expectations about talkers thatdoes not rely on speech produced by many different talkers,which is costly to collect and annotate, and only indirectly re-lated to listeners’ subjective expectations.