Voice as a Memory Cue
Sandra Campeanu · TSpace (University of Toronto) · 2014
The study of human memory often focuses on the benefit of context congruency. In the auditory domain, perhaps the most important context cue is speaker's voice. The present set of auditory experiments was designed to further our understanding of voice as a memory cue. Words were spoken in voices that were congruent on either accent or pitch, both or neither. Voice reinstatement signified maximum congruency and occurred when the same voice spoke the word initially and in a subsequent memory test; voice congruency referred to either accent or pitch being comparable between presentations of a word. These stimuli were chosen to validate and extend earlier models of voice congruency based primarily on variations of pitch between speakers; we investigated multiple salient voice parameters. Experiment 1 found that voice reinstatement aids word and speaker recognition, and that voice congruency partially benefits word recognition. Experiment 2 used a different paradigm and found that voice reinstatement is required to boost word recognition when participants are not given instructions to attend to voice. Experiment 3 provided preliminary evidence that voice reinstatement benefits implicit memory. Experiment 4 examined whether voice effects vary with linguistic background; the benefit of accent congruency to word recognition appears to be augmented in bilinguals of the same language as the accented speaker voice. The first two experiments also utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to discern the neural correlates underlying the use of voice in memory. Taken together, results indicate that the extent of voice congruency effects, as well as the characterization of ERP modulations reflective of memory components, depends on the task/paradigm used. For example, attention (or some extended processing) is required to observe partial voice congruency effects, while a voice reinstatement benefit appears to be more robust. Finally, this work serves as a starting point for future studies to understand voice congruency in implicit memory and in people with specific language abilities.