The time course of speaking rate specificity effects in spoken word recognition
Conor T. McLennan, Paul A. Luce · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2005
Specificity effects in spoken word recognition were previously examined by examining the circumstances under which variability in speaking rate affects participants perception of spoken words. The word recognition and memory literatures are now replete with demonstrations that variability has representational and processing consequences. The research focuses on one of the conditions expected to influence the extent to which variability plays a role in spoken word recognition, namely time course of processing. Based on previous work, it was hypothesized that speaking rate variability would only affect later stages of spoken word recognition. The results confirmed this hypothesis: Specificity effects were only obtained when processing was relatively slow. However, previous stimuli not only differed in speaking rate, but also in articulation style (i.e., casual and careful). Therefore, in the current set of experiments, it was sought to determine whether the same pattern of results would be obtained with stimuli that only differed in speaking rate (i.e., in the absence of articulation style differences). Moreover, to further generalize time course findings, the stimuli were produced by a different speaker than the speaker in the earlier study. The results add to the knowledge of the circumstances under which variability affects the perception of spoken words.