title: Verbal transformation: habituation or spreading activation?
abstract: Experiment 1 tested the habituation hypothesis of the Verbal Transformation Effect, an auditory illusion in which a repeating verbal stimulus undergoes perceptual transformation, by varying stimulus dimensions which might be expected to retard habituation. Transformations were found to increase as a function of imagery value and word length, failing to support the habituation hypothesis. Experiment 2, in which transformations were found to vary as a function of number of activated semantic representations of a physically invariant homophone stimulus, provided support for a new dual-process explanation of the Transformation effect, based on spreading activation between cognitive representations.
authors.affiliation: City University, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Z
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Kaminska
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pool
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mayer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary