The author wishes to thank James McQueen and
Elizabeth Johnson for comments made on an earlier
drafts of this paper.In a classic paper, Ladefoged and Broadbent [1] showed that
listeners adapt to speakers based on short-term exposure of a
single phrase. Recently, Norris, McQueen, and Cutler [2]
presented evidence for a lexically conditioned medium-term
adaptation to a particular speaker based on an exposure of 40
critical words among 200 items. In two experiments, I
investigated whether there is a connection between the two
findings. To this end, a vowel-normalization paradigm
(similar to [1]) was used with a carrier phrase that consisted of
either words or nonwords. The range of the second formant
was manipulated and this affected the perception of a target
vowel in a compensatory fashion: A low F2-range made it
more likely that a target vowel was perceived as a front vowel,
that is, with an inherently high F2. Manipulation of the lexical
status of the carrier phrase, however, did not affect vowel
normalization. In contrast, the range of vowels in the carrier
phrase did influence vowel normalization. If the carrier
phrase consisted of high-front vowels only, vowel categories
shifted only for high-front vowels. This may indicate that the
short-term and medium-term adaptations are brought about by
different mechanisms.peer-reviewe
