Maibauer, A. M., Markis, T.
A., Newell, J., & McLennan, C. T. (2014). Famous talker effects in spoken
word recognition. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76 (1), 11–18
Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sally
Talker
variability and its representational implications for spoken word recognition
were investigated in this study. Specifically, the authors aimed to determine
whether talker-independent (abstract) or talker-specific (episodic) lexical
representations would influence listeners’ perception of words. To investigate
the issue, a long-term repetition-priming paradigm was used. If priming is not
affected by a talker change, an abstract representation is presumably accessed.
On the other hand, if priming is reduced by the change, an episodic
representation is believed to be used. Moreover, as a compromise between abstractionist
and episodic theories, the time-course hypothesis proposes that they are different
circumstances under which each of these two types of representation is likely
to affect perception (early for abstract and later for episodic). Previous
studies have shown that priming is reduced by talker change, e.g., Schacter
& Church (1992); however, these studies were mainly done on unknown talkers.
In this study, the authors tapped into the issue on the relatively understudied
familiar talkers.
Two experiments were conducted to examine the
potential effect on famous and non-famous talkers. A speeded-shadowing task is
used for both experiments to encourage fast processing. Subjects were
instructed to repeat a spoken word as quickly and accurately as possible. In Experiment
1, stimulus words were extracted from talks of Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton. Results showed that RTs to repeated words were shorter than those to
unprimed words only when the words were spoken by the same talker. However, it
was hard to tease apart the two confounding factors that stimulus words were
extracted from spontaneous speeches of the two famous talkers (experimental
conditions), but were recorded in isolation for the control condition. To solve
the problem, in Experiment 2, the same stimuli words were recorded from two non-famous
talkers in the same sentence contexts. This time, RTs to repeated words were
consistently shorter than those to unprimed words, regardless of whether these
words were repeated by the same talker. The authors thus concluded that the time-course
hypothesis appeared to be only limited to unfamiliar talkers, and talker-specific
representations influenced spoken word perception at a relatively early stage when
the words were spoken by famous talkers.
