Accommodation refers to the ways in which listeners' and speakers' perceptual and interpretive processes change on a short-term basis while processing speech. Accommodation mechanisms target all types of realistic conditions and include plasticity/perceptual recalibration demonstrated by rapid perceptual learning, interlocutor-dependent changes in speech styles aimed to increase intelligibility, compensation strategies such as the increased use of the visual modality, trade-off mechanisms which shift reliance towards acoustic detail or lexical knowledge and changes in speech timing to avoid or reduce speech-noise interference for listeners.
Within the accommodation theme, three projects will investigate how listeners and speakers cope with the effects of challenging environments:
Project A-1 will examine adaptations used by listeners and speakers to help overcome adverse conditions, and how these adaptation abilities develop during second language learning.
In Project A-2, the accommodative focus concerns the online adaptation of technology to deal with the challenges faced by an aging population.
Project A-3 will explore how noise affects listeners’ reliance on low-level (e.g. phonetic encoding) versus higher-level (e.g. lexical-semantic integration) processes.
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