Paper accepted in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Be on the lookout for "Short-term, not long-term, average spectra of preceding sentences bias consonant categorization" by Anya Shorey and Christian Stilp which was just accepted for publication in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Considerable research on speaking rate normalization agrees: acoustic properties immediately before a target sound/word exert much more influence on its perception than acoustic properties of sounds that occurred further ago in the past. Despite this consensus, results were mixed as to how spectral properties of the recent/less recent past influenced speech perception. Here, the less recent (distal) spectral properties of context sentences exerted far less influence on perception of the subsequent target sounds than their more recent past (proximal; immediately preceding the target sounds). Not only does this parallel speaking rate normalization, but these shifts aligned beautifully with our past studies of natural stimulus statistics in context sentences (Stilp & Assgari, 2021) but less so when you use filters to synthetically and abruptly change sentence spectra partway through their duration (Stilp & Assgari, 2017; 2021).