S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Saturday Morning Papers 194–196
ken words. When living in a new dialect region, however, processing
difficulties associated with dialectal variation dissipate over time.
Through a series of priming tasks (form priming, semantic priming,
and long-term repetition priming), we investigate the role of experience
in the perception and representation of dialectal variation. The
main questions addressed are: (1) How are cross-dialect variants recognized
and stored, and (2) how are these variants accommodated by
listeners with different levels of exposure to a particular dialect?
Three claims are made based on the results: (1) Dialect production is
not representative of dialect perception and representation, (2) experience
is linked with a listener’s ability to recognize and represent spoken
words, and (3) there is a general benefit for having the status as
the “ideal” variant, even if this variant is not the most common one.
11:00–11:15 (194)
First Impressions and Last Resorts: How Listeners Adjust to
Speaker Variability. TANYA KRALJIC, University of California,
San Diego, & ARTHUR G. SAMUEL & SUSAN E. BRENNAN,
Stony Brook University—The study of speech perception is fundamentally
the search for processes that support perceptual constancy—
the perception of a variable physical signal as relatively constant. Little
reliable acoustic invariance exists in speech. We propose that
speech perception processes recover invariants not about the signal,
but about the source that produced the signal, and examine the evidence
the system can use to do so. We find perceptual learning for
properties of speech resulting from idiosyncratic speaker characteristics;
the same properties are not learned when they can be attributed
to incidental factors. In the absence of explicit attribution, the perceptual
system may rely on episodic order (a “first-impressions”
heuristic), but this heuristic can be overridden when relevant pragmatic
information is available (e.g., if the listener sees that the
speaker has a pen in her mouth). Perceptual learning is a powerful
mechanism for coping with variability, but is applied flexibly and
conservatively.
11:20–11:35 (195)
Exploring the Relationship Between Face Familiarity and
Speechreadbility. KAREN LANDER, University of Manchester—
30
Theories of face perception suggest independence between identity
and visual speech processing (Bruce & Young, 1986). In two experiments
we explore how face familiarity influences speechreadability.
In Experiment 1, we compare the speechreading performance from
participants who are, or are not, artificially familiarized with the
speaker. First, we measured baseline speechreading performance.
Next, participants either view the speaker telling a story (familiarized
group) or complete a pen and paper puzzle (control group).
Speechreading performance is then measured again. Finally, participants
view another story or complete another puzzle before
speechreading performance is re-measured. The results suggest that
speechreading performance improves faster when the participant is
more familiar with the speaker. In Experiment 2 we explore this effect
by comparing speechreading performance from a personally familiar
face and an unfamiliar one. The results are discussed with regard
to the independence of facial identity and visual speech
processing and the factors that influence speechreading.
11:40–11:55 (196)
Penetrability of Speech Segmentation Strategies by Attentional
Factors. SVEN L. MATTYS, University of Bristol—Although common
in everyday listening conditions, attentional loads have been largely
ignored in the literature on spoken-word recognition and segmentation.
Here, we investigated whether listeners’ segmentation strategies
are affected by a concurrent attentional load [the penetrability hypothesis]
and, if so, whether the nature of the load (lexical-semantic
vs. acoustic-phonetic) interacts with the nature of the segmentation
strategy (knowledge-driven vs. signal-driven) (the domain-specificity
hypothesis). Participants performed a segmentation task in one ear
while performing either semantic categorization or phoneme monitoring
on unrelated stimuli in the other ear. Compared to baseline,
both loads were found to increase knowledge-driven segmentation.
The results show that speech-processing mechanisms are penetrable
by attentional factors and that this effect is not domain specific:
Reliance on meaning is elevated whenever a processing load is encountered,
regardless of the nature of the load. This result is discussed
relative to theories of segmentation that give primacy to knowledgedriven
strategies.