The talker-specific nature of spoken language processing.

Abstract

During spoken communication, listeners must contend with a physical speech signal that carries information not only about the linguistic content of a talker’s utterance but also about a host of talker-specific attributes such as talker identity and emotion. Traditionally, the recovery of linguistic structure has been thought to be independent of the recovery of these indexical or surface characteristics of speech. Recent research, however, suggests that listeners remember the perceptual quality of spoken words, flexibly adapt to informative indexical variation in speech, and use this variation to guide their understanding of spoken words. This talk will review evidence for indexical specificity effects across a range of perceptual and memory tasks and will examine the linguistic, attentional, and cognitive constraints that may mediate the role of surface form in spoken language processing. Implications of these effects for accounts of linguistic representation and processing will be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD.]