Auditory Naming Task Research Articles

Effects of modality on subjective estimates of frequency and recency of spoken and printed words

Previous research (Pisoni and Garber, 1990; Garber and Pisoni, 1991) has demonstrated that subjective familiarity judgments for words are not differentially affected by the modality (visual or auditory) in which the words are presented, suggesting that subjects base their judgments on fairly abstract, modality‐independent representations in memory. However, in a recent large scale study in Japanese (Amano et al., in press), markedly modality effects on familiarity ratings were observed. The current research further examines possible modality differences in subjective ratings and their implications for word recognition. Specially selected words were presented to subjects for frequency and recency judgments. In particular, subjects were asked how frequently (or recently) they READ, WROTE, HEARD, or SAID a given spoken or printed word. These ratings were then used to predict accuracy and processing times in auditory and visual lexical decision and naming tasks. Our results suggest modality dependence for some lexical representations, primarily for words that occur fairly rarely in the language. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Subcategorical phonetic mismatches and lexical access

The place of phonetic analysis in the perception of words is unclear. While some theories assume fully specified phonemic strings as input, other theories assume that little analysis occurs. An earlier experiment by Streeter and Nigro (1979) produced evidence, based on auditorily presented words with misleading acoustic cues, that lexical decisions were based on mostly unanalyzed patterns, since word judgments were delayed by misleading information whereas nonword judgments were not. The present studies expand that work to a different set of cues, and to cases in which the overriding cue came first. An additional task, auditory naming, was used to examine the effects when the decision stage is less demanding. For the lexical decision task, misleading information slowed the responses, for both words and nonwords. In the auditory naming task, only the slower responses were affected. These results suggest that phonetic conflicts are resolved prior to lexical access.

Continuous and discontinuous access in spoken word-recognition: The role of derivational prefixes

Theories of spoken word-recognition differ in the claims they make about continuous and discontinuous mapping of the speech input onto mental representations of lexical form. The research reported here contrasts the claims of a discontinuous, prefix-stripping model, and of a cohort-based continuous access model. In three experiments, using the gating, auditory lexical decision, and auditory naming tasks, we compared recognition-points for prefixed words (such as miscount) and their corresponding free stems (such as count). The results disconfirm the prefix-stripping model, showing that the recognition-point for a prefixed word was determined by the properties of the word as a complete, full form, and not, as a prefix-stripping model requires, by the properties of its stem.