{"pk":49929,"title":"Latent speech representations learned through self-supervised learning predict listeners' generalization of adaptation across talkers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Unfamiliar accents can pose a challenge to speech recognition. However, listeners often adapt quickly to novel accents, and even generalize this adaptation across talkers with the same accent. We investigate how such cross-talker generalization---critical to effective speech perception---is achieved. We take advantage of advances in automatic speech recognition to test whether comparatively simple similarity-based inferences can explain cross-talker generalization in human listeners. We use the latent perceptual space learned by the HuBERT model---shaped by the statistics of the speech signal and the objective to recognize speech---to meaningfully measure the similarity between talkers' pronunciation. We find that word-level similarity in this latent space predict listeners' ability to successfully generalize across talkers. We discuss consequences for theories of adaptive speech perception. In particular, our results explain why cross-talker variability is not a prerequisite for cross-talker generalization (contrary to influential accounts).","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Language understanding; Speech recognition; Computational Modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/465543dw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Zhengyang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Sussex","department":""},{"first_name":"Yuhao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""},{"first_name":"T. Florian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jaeger","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Rochester","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49929/galley/37891/download/"}]}