The present study examines whether listeners flexibly adapt to unfamiliar speech patterns such as those encountered in foreign-accented English vowels, where the relative informativeness of primary (spectral quality) and secondary (duration) cues tends to be reversed (e.g., spectrally similar but exaggerated duration differences between bet and bat). This study further tests whether listeners’ adaptive strategies are related to individual differences in phoneme categorization gradiency and cognitive abilities. Native English listeners (N = 36) listened to a continuum of vowels from /ɛ/ to /æ/ (as in head and had) varying in spectral and duration values to complete a perceptual adaptation task and a visual analog scaling (VAS) task. Participants also completed cognitive tasks examining executive function capacities. Results showed that listeners mostly used spectral quality to signal vowel category at baseline, but flexibly adapted by up-weighting reliance on duration when spectral quality became no longer diagnostic. In the VAS task, some listeners made more categorical responses while others made more gradient responses in vowel categorization, but these differences were not linked to their adaptive patterns. Results of cognitive tasks revealed that individual differences in inhibitory control correlated, to some degree, with the amount of adaptation. Together, these findings suggest that listeners flexibly adapt to unfamiliar speech categories using distributional information in the input and individual differences in cognitive abilities may influence their adaptability.

本研究研究了听众是否能够灵活地适应陌生的语音模式，例如在外国口音的英语元音中遇到的那种，其中主要（频谱质量）和次要（持续时间）提示的相对信息性倾向于颠倒（例如，频谱相似但夸张）投注与击球之间的时长差异）。这项研究进一步测试了听众的自适应策略是否与音素分类梯度和认知能力的个体差异有关。英语为母语的听众（Ñ  = 36）听取元音从一个连续/ɛ/到/æ/（如在头和有）的频谱和持续时间值变化，以完成感知适应任务和视觉模拟缩放（VAS）任务。参与者还完成了检查执行功能能力的认知任务。结果表明，听众大多使用频谱质量来表示基线的元音类别，但是当频谱质量不再可用于诊断时，可以通过增加对持续时间的依赖来灵活地进行调整。在VAS任务中，一些收听者在元音分类中做出了更多的分类响应，而另一些则做出了更多的梯度响应，但是这些差异与他们的自适应模式无关。认知任务的结果表明，抑制控制的个体差异在一定程度上与适应量相关。一起，