Speaker sex influences processing of grammatical gender.

Michael S Vitevitch,Rutherford Goldstein,Allard Jongman,Joan Sereno

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0079701

Michael S Vitevitch, Rutherford Goldstein + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079701

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Nov 13, 2013
Citations: 31	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Kansas

Abstract

Spoken words carry linguistic and indexical information to listeners. ionist models of spoken word recognition suggest that indexical information is stripped away in a process called normalization to allow processing of the linguistic message to proceed. In contrast, exemplar models of the lexicon suggest that indexical information is retained in memory, and influences the process of spoken word recognition. In the present study native Spanish listeners heard Spanish words that varied in grammatical gender (masculine, ending in -o, or feminine, ending in -a) produced by either a male or a female speaker. When asked to indicate the grammatical gender of the words, listeners were faster and more accurate when the sex of the speaker “matched” the grammatical gender than when the sex of the speaker and the grammatical gender “mismatched.” No such interference was observed when listeners heard the same stimuli, but identified whether the speaker was male or female. This finding suggests that indexical information, in this case the sex of the speaker, influences not just processes associated with word recognition, but also higher-level processes associated with grammatical processing. This result also raises questions regarding the widespread assumption about the cognitive independence and automatic nature of grammatical processes.

Highlights

The speech signal contains linguistic information, conveying phonological, semantic, and syntactic information about a word, and indexical information, conveying paralinguistic information about the speaker, including regional and economic background, emotional state, as well as age and gender [1]
A convincing source of evidence for exemplar models of the lexicon is the many studies which demonstrate that changing the identity of the speaker during various phases of the experiment leads to reduced levels of performance in a variety of word recognition tasks compared to single-talker conditions [7,8]
A repeated measures ANOVA was used to examine accuracy rates and response speed to ‘‘matched’’ conditions and to ‘‘mismatched’’ conditions in each task

Summary

Introduction

The speech signal contains linguistic information, conveying phonological, semantic, and syntactic information about a word, and indexical information, conveying paralinguistic information about the speaker, including regional and economic background, emotional state, as well as age and gender [1]. Many models of spoken word recognition assume that lexical representations are stored in an abstract form in memory after a process of normalization has stripped away numerous sources of variability in the speech signal, including indexical information [2,3]. Alternative to these abstractionist models of spoken word recognition are models that suggest the lexicon contains numerous exemplar representations, each containing detailed information about the word and the speaker [4,5,6]. Previous studies typically changed the identity of the speaker, and measured the effect of this change using conventional word recognition tasks to assess the process of lexical access [cf., 9]

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