Heeding the voice of experience: the role of talker variation in lexical access.
Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort word-pairs were consistently spoken by a single talker (male couch, male cows), while other word-pairs were spoken by different talkers (male sheep, female sheet). After repeated instances of talker-word pairings, words from different-talker pairs showed smaller proportions of competitor fixations than words from same-talker pairs. In Experiment 2, participants learned to identify black-and-white shapes from novel labels spoken by one of two talkers. All of the 16 novel labels were VCVCV word-forms atypical of, but not phonologically illegal in, English. Again, a word was consistently spoken by one talker, and its cohort or rhyme competitor was consistently spoken either by that same talker (same-talker competitor) or the other talker (different-talker competitor). Targets with different-talker cohorts received greater fixation proportions than targets with same-talker cohorts, while the reverse was true for fixations to cohort competitors; there were fewer erroneous selections of competitor referents for different-talker competitors than same-talker competitors. Overall, these results support a view of the lexicon in which entries contain extra-phonemic information. Extensions of the artificial lexicon paradigm and developmental implications are discussed.
Creel
Sarah C
SC
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. creel@psych.upenn.edu
Aslin
Richard N
RN
Tanenhaus
Michael K
MK
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception