Processing speaker variability in Mandarin word recognition
Yu Zhang, Chao‐Yang Lee · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
The effect of speaker variability on Mandarin word recognition was investigated in two short-term priming experiments. Prime-target pairs that are identical (e.g., 画面image—画面image) or semantically related (e.g., 声音sound—画面image) were presented to native listeners auditorily in a lexical decision task. Since identical or related pairs usually elicit faster response relative to unrelated pairs, the question is whether prime and target pairs spoken by different speakers would affect the magnitude of priming. Forty-eight listeners made lexical decisions on the targets, and the speed and accuracy of the responses were measured. It was hypothesized that speaker variability between prime and target would result in reduced priming. However, contrary to previous studies using English materials, results from neither experiments support the hypothesis. The effect of speaker variability on priming appears to depend on listeners’ language background, suggesting tone-language users may be less susceptible to speaker variability in spoken word recognition.