Honking is just noise (or just about): The effect of energetic masking on recognition memory for spoken words

Abstract

Previous research indicates that listeners encode both linguistic and indexical specifications of the speech signal in memory. Recent evidence suggests that non-linguistic sounds co-occurring with spoken words are also incorporated in our lexical memory. We argue that this “sound-specificity effect” might not be due so much to a word-sound association as to the different acoustic glimpses of the words that the associated sounds create. In several recognition-memory experiments, we paired spoken words with one of two car honk sounds and varied the level of energetic masking from exposure to test. We did not observe a drop in recognition accuracy for previously heard words when the paired sound changed as long as energetic masking was controlled. However, when we manipulated the temporal overlap between words and honking to create an energetic masking contrast, accuracy dropped. The finding suggests that listeners encode irrelevant non-speech information in memory, but only in certain contexts. Calling for an expansion of the mental lexicon to include non-speech auditory information might be premature. Current work is investigating the effect in non-native listeners of English, and whether maskers that are more integral to the words and hence more difficult to segregate lead to a more robust effect.