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Abstract

Listeners are continuously exposed to a broad range of speech rates. Earlier work has shown that listeners perceive phonetic category boundaries relative to contextual speech rate. This process of rate - dependent speech perception has been suggested to occu r across talker changes, with the speech rate of talker A influencing perception of talker B. This study tested whether a ‘ global ’ speech rate calcu lated over multiple talkers and over a longer period of time affected perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast / ɑ / - /a:/. First, Experiment 1 demonstrated that listeners more often reported hearing long /a:/ in fast contexts than in ‘neutral rate ’ contexts , replicating earlier findings. Then, i n Experiment 2, one participant group was exposed to ‘neutral’ speech from talker A intermixed with slow speech from talker B. Another group listened to the same ‘neutral’ speech from talker A, but to fast speech from talker B. Between - group comparison in the ‘neutral’ condition revealed that Group 1 reported more long /a:/ tha n Group 2, indicating that A’s ‘neutral’ speech sounded faster when B was slower. Finally, Experiment 3 tested whether talking at slow or fast rates oneself elicits the same ‘global’ rate effects. However, no evidence was found that self - produced speech modulated perception of talker A . Th is study corroborate s the idea that ‘global’ rate - dependent effects occur across t alkers , but are insensitive to one’s own speech rate . Results are interpreted in light of the general auditory mechanisms thought to underlie rate normalization, with implications for our understanding of dialogue