Effects of voice-onset time and talker variability on lexical access

Abstract

The effects of voice-onset time (VOT) and talker variability on accessing word meanings were investigated. Two short-term semantic priming experiments were used to evaluate if the magnitude of semantic priming would be reduced by these two types of variability. In experiment 1, a lexical decision task and a phoneme identification task were used to examine whether listeners’ sensitivity to VOT affects their processing of a semantically related word. In experiment 2, a lexical decision task and a talker discrimination task were used to examine whether listeners’ sensitivity to talker changes affects lexical access. The results showed that while listeners were sensitive to VOT and talker variability, neither affected the magnitude of semantic priming. Nonetheless, experiment 2 also showed that talker discrimination was easier when real word targets were presented, indicating that the word/non-word lexical status affected the processing of talker information. These findings, overall, suggest that there is no ...