Lexical access across talkers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe current paper examined whether lexical access might (ever) cross talker boundaries. In four cross-modal priming experiments, listeners made visual lexical decisions after hearing an auditory word or word pair. On some trials, the auditory signal was produced by a single talker; on other trials, a talker gender change occurred in the middle of the auditory sequence. Participants demonstrated priming for items crossing both word boundaries and talker changes: after hearing a male talker say my and a female talker say great, participants showed a speeded response to “geese” (related to “migrate”). Priming was based on the combination of syllables across talkers, not driven simply by the first word. Findings suggest that acoustic cues indicating multiple talkers are insufficient to disrupt lexical access, and activation of lexical representations is not limited to those occurring within a single-talker stream. This provides support for models that do not involve explicit pre-lexical segmentation.