The gating paradigm: a comparison of successive and individual presentation formats.

Abstract

Recent use of the gating paradigm (Grosjean, 1980) has shown it to be an effective technique for the study of spoken word-recognition processes. However, because of its “successive” presentation format, questions have been raised regarding the effect of repetition on subjects’ performance in the task. In the present study, a subset of the words used in the original experiment were recorded at several gate durations and in two of the three original context conditions. The words were presented to different groups of subjects who heard them at only one gate duration. Thus, the repetitive aspect of the presentation format was eliminated. The results were compared to those obtained in the original study with respect to the number of subjects guessing the words correctly, the confidence ratings, and the error patterns at each test gate in each context condition. The findings indicate that, apart from a slight increase in confidence ratings in the context condition, the successive presentation format does not appear to influence the subjects’ performance in the gating task.