In:Phonological and Phonetic Considerations of Lexical Processing
Edited by Gonia Jarema and Gary Libben †
[Benjamins Current Topics 80] 2015
► pp. 15–40
How robust are exemplar effects in word comprehension?
Published online: 1 October 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.80.01han
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.80.01han
This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed.
References (20)
Baayen, R., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Bradlow, A., Nygaard, L., & Pisoni, D. (1999). Effects of talker, rate, and amplitude variation on recognition memory for spoken words. Perception & Psychophysics, 61, 206–219.
Craik, F., & Kirsner, K. (1974). The effect of speaker’s voice on word recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 26, 274–284.
Dahan, D., Drucker, S., & Scarborough, R. (2008). Talker adaptation in speech perception: Adjusting the signal or the representations? Cognition, 108(3), 710–718.
Faraway, J. (2006). Extending linear models with R: generalized linear mixed effects and nonpara metric regression models. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Goh, W. (2005). Talker variability and recognition memory: Instance-specific and voice-specific effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 40–53.
Goldinger, S. (1996). Words and voices: Episodic traces in spoken word identification and recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 1166–1183.
. (2007). A complementary-systems approach to abstract and episodic speech perception. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 49–54). Saarbrücken, Germany.
Hanique, I., Ernestus, M., & Boves, L. (2015). Choice and pronunciation of words: Individual differences within a homogeneous group of speakers. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory11, 161–185.
Hanique, I., Ernestus, M., & Schuppler, B. (2013). Informal speech processes can be categorical in nature, even if they affect many different words. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(3), 1644–1655.
Janse, E. (2008). Spoken-word processing in aphasia: Effects of item overlap and item repetition. Brain and Language, 105, 185–198.
Mattys, S., & Liss, J. (2008). On building models of spoken-word recognition: When there is as much to learn from natural “oddities” as artificial normality. Perception and Psychophysics, 70(7), 1235–1242.
Mattys, S., & Wiget, L. (2011). Effects of cognitive load on speech recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 145–160.
McLennan, C., & Luce, P. (2005). Examining the time course of indexical specificity effects in spoken word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 306–321.
McLennan, C., Luce, P., & Charles-Luce, J. (2003). Representation of lexical form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29(4), 539–553.
Oostdijk, N. (2002). The design of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. InP. Peters, P. Collins, & A. Smith(Eds.), New frontiers of corpus research (pp. 105–112). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Palmeri, T., Goldinger, S., & Pisoni, D. (1993). Episodic encoding of voice attributes and recognition memory for spoken words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 309–328.
Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R.H. (2005). Lexical frequency and acoustic reduction in spoken Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118(4), 2561–2569.