Acoustic context effects, where surrounding changes in pitch, rate or timbre influence the perception of a sound, are well documented in speech perception, but how they interact with language background remains unclear. Using a reverse-correlation approach, we systematically varied the pitch and speech rate in phrases around different pairs of vowels for second language (L2) speakers of English (/i/-/I/) and French (/u/-/y/), thus reconstructing, in a data-driven manner, the prosodic profiles that bias their perception. Testing English and French speakers (n=25), we showed that vowel perception is in fact influenced by conflicting effects from the surrounding pitch and speech rate: a congruent proximal effect 0.2s pre-target and a distal contrastive effect up to 1s before; and found that L1 and L2 speakers exhibited strikingly similar prosodic profiles in perception. We provide a novel method to investigate acoustic context effects across stimuli, timescales, and acoustic domain.

翻译：声学语境效应（即周围音高、语速或音色的变化影响声音感知的现象）在言语感知研究中已有充分记录，但其与语言背景的交互作用仍不明确。本研究采用反向相关方法，系统操控英语二语（L2）使用者感知的元音对（/i/-/I/）及法语二语使用者感知的元音对（/u/-/y/）周围短语中的音高与语速，从而以数据驱动方式重建影响其感知的韵律特征轮廓。通过对英语与法语母语者（n=25）的测试，我们发现元音感知实际上受到周围音高与语速的冲突性效应影响：目标前0.2秒内存在一致性近端效应，而目标前1秒内则存在对比性远端效应；同时发现一语（L1）与二语（L2）使用者在感知中展现出高度相似的韵律特征轮廓。本研究提出了一种新颖方法，用于跨刺激、跨时间尺度及跨声学维度探究声学语境效应。