Speech and music are highly redundant communication systems, with multiple acoustic cues signaling the existence of perceptual categories. This redundancy makes these systems robust to the influence of noise, but necessitates the development of perceptual strategies: listeners need to decide how much importance to place on each source of information. Prior empirical work and modeling has suggested that cue weights primarily reflect within-task statistical learning, as listeners assess the reliability with which different acoustic dimensions signal a category and modify their weights accordingly. Here we present evidence that perceptual experience can lead to changes in cue weighting that extend across tasks and across domains, suggesting that perceptual strategies reflect both global biases and local (i.e. task-specific) learning.

In two experiments, native speakers of Mandarin (N = 45)—where pitch is a crucial cue to word identity—placed more importance on pitch and less importance on other dimensions compared to native speakers of non-tonal languages English (N = 45) and Spanish (N = 27), during the perception of both English speech and musical beats. In a third experiment, we further show that Mandarin speakers are better able to attend to pitch and ignore irrelevant variation in other dimensions in speech compared to English and Spanish speakers, and even struggle to ignore pitch when asked to attend to other dimensions. Thus, an individual's idiosyncratic auditory perceptual strategy reflects a complex mixture of congenital predispositions, task-specific learning, and biases instilled by extensive experience in making use of important dimensions in their native language.

语音和音乐是高度冗余的通信系统，具有多种声音提示，表明存在感知类别。这种冗余使这些系统对噪声的影响变得健壮，但必须开发感知策略：收听者需要确定对每种信息源的重视程度。先前的经验工作和建模表明，提示权重主要反映任务内的统计学习，因为听众评估了不同声学尺寸发出类别信号的可靠性，并相应地修改了权重。在这里，我们提供的证据表明，感知经验可以导致提示权重的变化，该权重在跨任务和跨领域扩展，这表明感知策略既反映了全局偏见又反映了本地（即特定于任务的）学习。

在两个实验中，母语为普通话（N  = 45）的人比母语为非调性语言的英语（N  = 45）的人更重视音调，而对其他维度的关注度则较低，而母语是普通话（N = 45）和西班牙语（N = 27），同时感知英语语音和音乐节拍。在第三个实验中，我们进一步证明与英语和西班牙语的说话者相比，说普通话的说话者能够更好地参与音调，而忽略其他方面的语音变化，甚至在被要求参加其他场合时，甚至难以忽略音调。因此，一个人的特质听觉感知策略反映了先天性倾向，特定于任务的学习和偏见的复杂混合，这些偏见是由在使用其母语中使用重要维度的丰富经验所灌输的。