Transfer of statistical learning from speech perception to production generalizes to reading

Past research has shown that short-term exposure to speech carrying certain acoustic statistics transfers robustly to speech production. However, all studies reporting such transfer have used auditory repetition tasks. Therefore, it is unclear whether perception-production transfer in the acoustic-phonetic domain extends to tasks without an auditory model to probe production. We answer this question in two experiments. Experiment 1 shows that people read aloud the words BEER and PEER differently after exposure to auditory samples of “beer” and “peer” drawn from a distribution of standard American English vs. a distribution of slightly accented speech. Experiments 2A and 2B replicate this finding and show generalization to reading a new word pair (BEACH/PEACH) and a new nonword pair (BEETH/PEETH). Collectively, these results demonstrate that the perception-production transfer in the acoustic-phonetic domain extends beyond auditory repetition tasks to production tasks without an explicit auditory model, and that this transfer generalizes to new syllables.