Reading aloud in clear speech reduces sentence recognition memory and recall for native and non-native talkers.

Abstract

Speaking style variation plays a role in how listeners remember speech. Compared to conversational sentences, clearly spoken sentences were better recalled and identified as previously heard by native and non-native listeners. The present study investigated whether speaking style variation also plays a role in how talkers remember speech that they produce. Although distinctive forms of production (e.g., singing, speaking loudly) can enhance memory, the cognitive and articulatory efforts required to plan and produce listener-oriented hyper-articulated clear speech could detrimentally affect encoding and subsequent retrieval. Native and non-native English talkers' memories for sentences that they read aloud in clear and conversational speaking styles were assessed through a sentence recognition memory task (experiment 1; N = 90) and a recall task (experiment 2; N = 75). The results showed enhanced recognition memory and recall for sentences read aloud conversationally rather than clearly for both talker groups. In line with the "effortfulness" hypothesis, producing clear speech may increase the processing load diverting resources from memory encoding. Implications for the relationship between speech perception and production are discussed.