Acoustic reduction, context, and inter-stimulus interval in cross-modal priming

Abstract

Work such as Tucker (2011) and van de Ven et al. (2011) show that reduced acoustic contrasts can impede lexical access for a listener. Tucker (2011) also found preliminary evidence of a nonlinear (U-shaped) relationship between the degree of intensity dip in stops and lexical decision response times. The present talk summarizes results from a cross-modal identity priming experiment designed to explore this potential nonlinearity further. Utilizing three different inter-stimulus-intervals, trials were presented in which conversational words with variously reduced intervocalic stops served as auditory primes. Visual targets included the same word as the prime, words with a large degree of phonological overlap, and unrelated controls, as well as phonologically overlapping and non-overlapping pseudowords. Additionally, the auditory primes were presented with three degrees of surrounding context: isolation (the word only), phonetic context (including the vowels in neighboring syllables, providing primarily spe...