Results in the domains of spoken phrase identification indicate that lexical

Results in the domains of spoken phrase identification indicate that lexical representations contain both Clodronate disodium episodic and abstract details. talker-specificity results surfaced when listeners taken care of talker gender however not when they taken care of syntactic characteristics despite the fact that digesting period at retrieval was considerably much longer in the last mentioned condition. Outcomes from Test 3 demonstrated no talker-specificity results when going to to lexical characteristics even when processing at retrieval was slowed by the addition of background noise. Collectively these results suggest that when processing time during retrieval is definitely decoupled from encoding factors it fails to predict the emergence of talker-specificity effects. Rather attention during encoding appears to be the putative variable. Intro One pervasive theme across mental domains issues the cognitive factors that underlie the perceptual ability to treat physically distinct elements as members of the same conceptual category. Within the website of spoken term recognition a primary target of study has been to describe how Clodronate disodium listeners accomplish Rabbit polyclonal to IL4. stable perception given the designated variability in mapping between the conversation transmission and linguistic representation. The acoustic-phonetic info used to specify a particular consonant or vowel and thus for individual words can vary from utterance to utterance depending on many factors including speaking rate (Miller 1981 phonetic context (Delattre et al. 1955 and even idiosyncratic variations in pronunciation across individual talkers (e.g. Klatt 1986 Theodore et al. 2009 Given this variability the challenge for the listener is definitely to recognize literally distinct objects as equivalent in order to accomplish robust understanding. The prevailing theoretical look at for many years was that perceptual constancy for spoken language was achieved via a normalization process such that variability in the conversation signal was discarded early in the perceptual process in order to map the conversation signal Clodronate disodium onto abstract linguistic representations (e.g. Ladefoged & Broadbent 1957 Magnuson & Nusbaum 2007 Mullennix et al. 1989 Under such an account information about the specific phonetic details of an utterance was thought Clodronate disodium to be absent from long-term memory space. However more recent investigations suggest that listeners do retain surface characteristics for individual terms (Goldinger 1998 Palmeri et al. 1993 which helps episodic-based models that posit that fine-grained phonetic information is retained in memory (e.g. Goldinger 1996 1998 Grossberg 1986 The common characteristic of these models is that each presentation of a given word is stored as a trace in memory; over time lexical representations are viewed as a distribution centered on the most frequent experience but also retaining specific characteristics of infrequent traces. In this vein a series of studies has focused on listener sensitivity to phonetic variation associated with individual speakers. It has long been known that familiarity with talkers’ voices benefits subsequent processing. Not only is word intelligibility improved for familiar compared to unfamiliar voices (Nygaard et al. 1994 but processing time is faster for Clodronate disodium familiar compared to unfamiliar voices (Clarke & Garrett 2004 These effects have been explained as the consequence of encoding talker-specific phonetic detail and indeed there is strong evidence that many detailed surface characteristics including those associated with individual talkers are preserved in memory (e.g. Church & Schacter 1994 McLennan & Luce 2005 Nygaard Burt & Queen 2000 Palmeri et al. 1993 Schacter & Church 1992 Recent findings suggest that such talker-specificity effects while robust arise relatively late in processing. Using a long-term repetition-priming paradigm McLennan and Luce (2005) found that talker-specificity effects were observed only when processing was relatively slow. In contrast allophonic-specificity effects were observed when processing was relatively fast (McLennan et al. 2003 McLennan and colleagues explain this difference in Clodronate disodium terms of the relative frequency of both types of variability. They posit that allophonic variability such as a flap produced for medial /t/ is more frequently encountered than any particular talker’s phonetic signature. They model this effect using the architecture of adaptive resonance theory (ART; Grossberg 1986 Within the ART framework more frequent representations will spread activation with greater intensity thus building to a.