Do individual differences in lexical reliance reflect states or traits?

Abstract

Individual differences in listeners’ reliance on lexical information for speech perception have been established in the literature. However, it is not yet clear whether these individual differences reflect a context-dependent “state” or whether they reflect a stable listener “trait.” To examine this question, listeners completed three measures of lexical processing and one measure of acoustic-phonetic processing at two time points (n = 80 at session 1; n = 41 at session 2). Results to date suggest limited within-session convergence among the three measures of lexical processing, inconsistent with past results. However, strong between-session relationships for two of the three measures of lexical processing and the measure of acoustic-phonetic processing and were found, suggesting that performance in these tasks may reflect stable individual traits. A strong trading relationship between reliance on lexical versus acoustic-phonetic information was only found when both sources of information were available in a given task, suggesting that individual differences in cue use may emerge most strongly when cues conflict in speech input. Collectively, the current results suggest that individuals are stable in their acoustic-phonetic and lexical cue use strategies for a given task, but that an individual’s cue use strategy may be task-dependent.