Intonation Adaptation to Multiple Talkers

Speech intonation conveys a wealth of linguistic and social information, such as the intention to ask a question versus make a statement. However, due to the considerable variability in our speaking voices, the mapping from meaning to intonation can be many-to-many and often ambiguous. Previous studies suggest that the comprehension system resolves this ambiguity, at least in part, by adapting to recent exposure. However, these studies have largely been limited to single-talker exposure, leaving open how listeners adapt to input from multiple talkers. Four experiments herein address this question. Listeners were exposed to a male and/or female talker producing statements (“It’s raining.”) and declarative questions (“It’s raining?”). After exposure, listeners categorized the utterances of both talkers (Experiments 1–3) or a novel test talker (Experiment 4) as statements or questions. In all four experiments, intonation adaptation was found, and it was neither strictly talker-dependent nor strictly talker-independent. While listeners tracked production patterns unique to each talker, adaptation sometimes generalized across talkers. We relate these findings to research on segmental speech perception, which has found that talker-dependence is conditioned on phonetic contrast or cue distributions.