Detailed phonetic memory for multi-word and part-word sequences

Abstract

AbstractHumans recognize previously heard spoken words better when repetitions of the words involve identical productions than productions by a different speaker. Such findings have been taken as evidence that perceived instances of words or sub-lexical units are stored in a detailed form in memory, and that collections of these memory traces comprise or are linked to mental lexical representations. This study tested a different possibility, that detailed acoustic memory occurs during spoken language processing but does not necessarily correspond to words or other traditionally defined units. Two experiments examined lexical access and recognition memory for continuous speech sequences, extracted from a spoken language corpus, as a function of sequence length and onset phase (with respect to word onset), and speaker. Qualitatively different patterns between word identification and memory performance based on these three variables provide little evidence for a role of the word level of representation in memory for the sequences, and suggest that memory-based processing may more independent of this level than has been assumed.