Language Science Meets Cognitive Science: Categorization and Adaptation

I found that changing the rate of the beginning of a sentence can lead a consonant towards the end of the sentence to change in its perceived duration; a short consonant can sound like a long one, and a long consonant can sound like a short one. An analogous experiment examined rate adaptation in event segmentation, where adaptation-like effects had not previously been explored, using recordings of an actor interacting with a touchscreen.

I found that the perception of actions can also be affected by the rate of previously-occurring actions. Listeners adapt to the rate at the beginning of a series of actions when deciding what they saw last in that series of actions. This suggests that rate adaptation follows similar lines across both domains.

All told, this dissertation leads to a picture of domain-specificity in which both domain-general and domain-specific processes can operate, with domain-specific processes can help scaffold the use of domain-general processing.