Speaker information affects false recognition of unstudied lexical-semantic associates

• Published in: Attention, perception & psychophysics Vol. 80; no. 4; pp. 894 - 912
• Main Authors: Luthra, Sahil, Fox, Neal P., Blumstein, Sheila E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.05.2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; Auditory Perception - physiology; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Deixis; Evidence; Experiments; False memory; Female; Hearing; Humans; Language Processing; Learning - physiology; Lexical semantics; Male; Memory; Memory - physiology; Networks; Oral Language; Phonetics; Phonology; Priming; Psychology; Recognition; Recognition, Psychology; Semantics; Semiotics; Speech; Stimuli; Word Processing; Word Recognition; Attention and memory; Spoken word recognition; Phonology and semantics
• ISSN: 1943-3921; 1943-393X; 1943-393X
• DOI: 10.3758/s13414-018-1485-z

Recognition of and memory for a spoken word can be facilitated by a prior presentation of that word spoken by the same talker. However, it is less clear whether this speaker congruency advantage generalizes to facilitate recognition of unheard related words. The present investigation employed a false memory paradigm to examine whether information about a speaker’s identity in items heard by listeners could influence the recognition of novel items (critical intruders) phonologically or semantically related to the studied items. In Experiment 1 , false recognition of semantically associated critical intruders was sensitive to speaker information, though only when subjects attended to talker identity during encoding. Results from Experiment 2 also provide some evidence that talker information affects the false recognition of critical intruders. Taken together, the present findings indicate that indexical information is able to contact the lexical-semantic network to affect the processing of unheard words.