Lexically-guided and visually-guided perceptual learning have been argued to tap into the same general perceptual mechanism. Using the visually-guided paradigm, some have argued that the resulting retuning effect is specific to the phonetic context in which it is learned; which in turn has been used to argue that such retuning targets context-dependent sub-lexical units. We use three new experiments to study the generalizable nature of lexically-guided perceptual learning of fricative consonants and how type variation in the training stimuli affects it. In contrast to visually-guided retuning, we show that lexical retuning does generalize to new phonetic contexts, particularly when listeners are trained with type variation. This suggests that there is an abstract context-independent representation that is used in speech perception and during lexical retuning. While the same generalization is not clearly observed when type variation is eliminated, the lack of a clear interaction effect between training types prevents us from inferring that lexically-guided perceptual learning needs type variation within the training stimuli to generalize to new phonetic contexts. Furthermore, we point out that some of these effects are subtle and are only observable if we take into account pre-training group difference between the control and test groups.

词汇引导和视觉引导的知觉学习被认为可以利用相同的一般知觉机制。使用视觉引导的范式，有人认为，所产生的重音效果是特定于学习它的语音环境的；反过来，这又被用来辩称这种重新调整针对的是上下文相关的次词汇单元。我们使用三个新的实验来研究摩擦辅音的词汇指导知觉学习的普遍性以及训练刺激中的类型变化如何对其产生影响。与视觉引导的重调相反，我们表明词汇重调确实可以推广到新的语音环境中，尤其是在听众接受了类型变异训练时。这表明在语音感知和词汇重调过程中使用了一种抽象的上下文无关表示。虽然消除类型差异后无法清楚地观察到相同的概括，但是训练类型之间缺乏清晰的交互作用使我们无法推断出词汇指导的感知学习需要在训练刺激中改变类型，以推广到新的语音环境。此外，我们指出，其中一些影响是微妙的，只有在考虑到对照组和测试组之间的预训练组差异后才能观察到。