Abstract
Recognition proficiency was measured in a lexical decision experiment using Korean words including ones that are stereotypically associated with younger or older people. Both accuracy rates and response times were significantly improved when a word was spoken in a voice whose age matched the age category of the word based on stereotype-based age rating. Accuracy rates were also significantly improved when a word was spoken in a voice whose age matched the frequency-based age category, although the effect on response times was marginal. The results are discussed in the context of an exemplar-based account incorporating social exemplar activation. First, the activation of social information is influenced by distributional properties of lexical use across social groups, indicating that social information of speakers is not only linked to sub-lexical representations as shown in previous studies, but also directly linked to lexical representations through social indices. Furthermore, the presence of an additional effect of stereotypes expands our understanding of the speech perception mechanism, suggesting that the social indices are enhanced by stereotypical associations between words and age categories. When listening to words with a wide spectrum of age-related variability, word-stereotypes activate social information, guiding to the lexical representations via social indices.
Highlights
During the past few decades, numerous words have been created and spread out by younger speakers of Korean, yielding a great deal of generational gap in terms of what lexical items are preferably used
We propose that statistical distribution across social groups plays a crucial role in the formation of social indices over stored exemplars, but the distributional association is reinforced by word-stereotypes, which are indexed to the lexical representation, and affect lexical access
The growing complexity in social interactions raises questions about the cognitive mapping of the dynamics, which is closely related to the nature of speech perception
Summary
During the past few decades, numerous words have been created and spread out by younger speakers of Korean, yielding a great deal of generational gap in terms of what lexical items are preferably used. Even though no concrete talker information was given, the perceptual boundaries of the participant group that was asked to imagine a female speaker were influenced mirroring the physiological difference of vocal tract length. Based on these results, Johnson et al conclude that the integration of visual and auditory sociolinguistic cues either in a concrete form (by visual cues) or in an abstract form (by imagination) take place in an early stage of speaker normalization. They note that estimation of vocal tract size (e.g., Ladefoged & Broadbent, 1957) is not a consistently predictable parameter in reality, so that what listeners perceive are the concrete cues based on algorithmic sensory information concerning physical properties and subjective and abstract representations of talkers based on experiences and expectations
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