Interpreting Garner interference
Shawn A. Weil, Mark A. Pitt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
The Garner (1974) speeded classification procedure has long been used in psychoacoustic, speech perception, and music perception research to assess the relative integrality or separability of stimulus dimensions. Interference between dimensions is indicated by a drop in performance between an orthogonal condition (two dimensions varied independently) and a control condition (one dimension held constant, the other varied). In a meta-analysis, the ubiquity of Garner interference was examined to understand better the meaning of interference and the theoretical claims that can be drawn from it. Within this context, a set of experiments revisited the source of interference found between talker and phonetic dimensions (Mullennix and Pisoni, 1990). Individual speaker variability (simulated by multiple single-speaker tokens) and word-initial consonant (/b/ vs /p/) were manipulated.