Key words: linguistics, perceptual learning, speech

"Lexical and audiovisual bases of perceptual adaptation in speech"

Listeners often experience difficulty in understanding a speaker, and in order to cope with this, listeners may rely on a strategy such as perceptual adaptation to ease interpretation. Through perceptual adaptation, listeners can learn to utilize the contextual cues contained in speech, such as lexical knowledge (or knowledge of the words being used by the speaker) or by lip-reading. The experiments detailed in this thesis investigated how these two contextual cues can combine and interact during perceptual adaptation, and some of the potential brain areas involved in facilitating this process.