Lexical access across different voices.
Rochelle Suzanne Newman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
In many real-world situations, listeners may be trying to attend to one individual while other voices are speaking in the background. These separate streams of sound hit the ear simultaneously. Within a single stream, research has investigated the extent to which lexical activation is limited by word boundary information. For example, Gow and Gordon (1995) found that multiple-word sequences such as “two lips” may activate words such as “tulips” despite the presence of acoustic cues to a word boundary in the middle of the sequence. Yet, no studies have examined whether lexical access could “cross” signals entirely. In a series of four experiments, we test whether lexical access might (ever) cross talker boundaries. We find that when listeners hear two words spoken by two different voices (for example, a male saying “two” followed by a female saying “lips”) they still activate the larger cross-voice word “tulips,” despite the presence of strong cues to an acoustic boundary. [Work supported by NSF.]