Adaptation to sentences and melodies when making judgments along a voice–nonvoice continuum

Adaptation to constant or repetitive sensory signals serves to improve detection of novel events in the environment and to encode incoming information more efficiently. Within the auditory modality, contrastive adaptation effects have been observed within a number of categories, including voice and musical instrument type. A recent study found contrastive perceptual shifts between voice and instrument categories following repetitive presentation of adaptors consisting of either vowels or instrument tones. The current study tested the generalizability of adaptation along a voice–instrument continuum, using more ecologically valid adaptors. Participants were presented with an adaptor followed by an ambiguous voice–instrument target, created by generating a 10-step morphed continuum between pairs of vowel and instrument sounds. Listeners’ categorization of the target sounds was shifted contrastively by a spoken sentence or instrumental melody adaptor, regardless of whether the adaptor and the target shared the same speaker gender or similar pitch range (Experiment 1). However, no significant contrastive adaptation was observed when nonspeech vocalizations or nonpitched percussion sounds were used as the adaptors (Experiment 2). The results suggest that adaptation between voice and nonvoice categories does not rely on exact repetition of simple stimuli, nor does it solely reflect the result of a sound being categorized as being human or nonhuman sourced. The outcomes suggest future directions for determining the precise spectro-temporal properties of sounds that induce these voice–instrument contrastive adaptation effects.