How does the incrementality of auditory word perception interplay with episodic and semantic memory?

Abstract

In contrast to visual word presentation, auditory words unfold over time and stimulus information reaches subsequent processing stages only incrementally. The influence of this incrementality was assessed in the present study. Target nouns were semantically primed by synonymous or non-synonymous preceding nouns and had to be categorized by speeded choice responses according to their synonymity. Long-term repetition was manipulated by presenting these prime-target pairs twice in two halves of the experiment and the effect of incrementality was assessed by sorting the target nouns according to three bins of word length. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to the target words. Both behavioural and ERP-results are in agreement with an incremental auditory word processing model, where long-term repetition and semantic priming affect separable processes, presumably episodic and semantic memory, respectively.