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Separable cognitive mechanisms for word learning and perceptual learning of novel speech

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Samuel Weiss-Cowie¹ (), Lucy MacGregor¹, Matthew Davis¹; ¹University of Cambridge

Perceptual learning and word learning are key adaptive processes in speech comprehension. However, little is known about how they interact when both are potentially appropriate. For instance, should the pseudoword /lɛdər/ be interpreted as an accented form of ‘letter’ or a new word, ‘ledder’? In two online studies and one M/EEG study, semantically constraining sentence contexts guided participants towards inferring a pseudoword’s meaning (i.e., word learning; “Every morning, Sophie drank a cup of… /pəbuːf/”) or correcting an accented familiar word’s surface form (i.e., perceptual learning; “The sailors found their way north using a… /kʌmpəf/”). Study 1 (N=108) demonstrated that participants can engage both learning processes in one task, and the extent of learning depends on the relative number of unique trained items (type frequency) and item repetitions (token frequency). Study 2 (N=180) showed that with suitable type and token frequencies, perceptual and word learning persist for at least 12 hours, and that perceptual learning and word learning performance are uncorrelated. In Study 3 (N=32), simultaneous M/EEG recordings were collected as participants listened to words and pseudowords before, during, and after training to induce perceptual learning and word learning. Sensor-level analyses revealed late-arising lexicality-sensitive spatio-temporal activity clusters pre-training that diverged post-training depending on the type of learning applied for specific items. Ongoing analyses are exploring how learning emerges during training and localizing the source generators of the effects. Results provide evidence that perceptual learning and word learning can be induced with a single paradigm yet are distinct cognitive and neural processes.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Lexicon