Voice information in auditory form-based priming

Abstract

In auditory form-based priming, subjects are presented with speech stimuli that are phonetically related. Research has shown that a prime can facilitate recognition of a target item if prime and target share an initial phonetic segment. This facilitory effect has been considered either a result of residual activation of the initial phonetic representation [L. M. Slowiaczek and M. B. Hamburger, JEP: LMC 18, 1239–1250 (1992)] or post-perceptual guessing strategy [Goldinger etal., JEP: LMC 18, 1211–1238 (1992)]. It could be, however, that the facilitation is at least in part based on nonlinguistic auditory information. Previous studies have always used the same speaker for prime and target items. In the present investigation, auditory form-based priming experiments were conducted where voice information was changed from prime to target. Initial results reveal that varying voice information eliminates the facilitation effect. This could suggest that the effect is based on residual auditory activation. Follow-up experiments test whether eliminating the acoustic trace through backward masking attenuates the facilitation effect. Implications of these results will be discussed in terms of current models of spoken word recognition. [Work supported by NSF.]