The effects of talker characterisics on implicit memory for spoken sentences
Jennifer S. Queen, Lynne C. Nygaard, Lawrence W. Barsalou · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2002
Recent research has shown that surface characteristics of speech such as talker identity are retained in long-term memory for individual spoken words, but little research has examined retention of surface form in the processing of larger linguistic units. The present experiment investigated the effects of talker identity and talker-relevant background information on implicit memory for spoken sentences. Listeners heard a conversation between two speakers. The conversation focused on 2 topic areas, football at Emory and lunching at the dining hall. At test, listeners were presented with sentences in noise that were either previously heard in the conversation or new sentences on the same topics. Half of the old test items were spoken by the speaker who said them during the conversation and half were spoken by the other speaker. Results showed that listeners correctly identified more sentences at test when they were repeated by the same speaker than by the other speaker. The results suggest that talker characteristics are retained and used in sentence as well as spoken word recognition.