title: Changing only the probability that spoken words will be distorted changes how they are recognized.
abstract: An eye-tracking experiment examined contextual flexibility in speech processing in response to distortions in spoken input. Dutch participants heard Dutch sentences containing critical words and saw four-picture displays. The name of one picture either had the same onset phonemes as the critical word or had a different first phoneme and rhymed. Participants fixated on onset-overlap more than rhyme-overlap pictures, but this tendency varied with speech quality. Relative to a baseline with noise-free sentences, participants looked less at onset-overlap and more at rhyme-overlap pictures when phonemes in the sentences (but not in the critical words) were replaced by noises like those heard on a badly tuned AM radio. The position of the noises (word-initial or word-medial) had no effect. Noises elsewhere in the sentences apparently made evidence about the critical word less reliable: Listeners became less confident of having heard the onset-overlap name but also less sure of having not heard the rhyme-overlap name. The same acoustic information has different effects on spoken-word recognition as the probability of distortion changes.
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognition, and Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. j.mcqueen@pwo.ru.nl
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: McQueen
authors.forename: Falk
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Huettig
mesh_terms: D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D010469:Perceptual Distortion / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011336:Probability; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*