Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Evening Posters 3065–3070
of a word may affect the process of spoken word recognition. Two
cross-modal recognition priming experiments examined word-final
flapping, in which a final /t/ is expressed as a more /d/-like flap. In
Experiment 1, a smaller priming effect was found for flapped productions
of words such as eat, as compared with the typical form. The
priming disadvantage for the flapped production may result from the
presence of phonological mismatch, the presence of orthographic mismatch,
or the presence of both types of mismatch. Experiment 2 used
a second class of words, such as looked, with a typical spoken form
(/lυkt/) that does not correspond with their orthography. Flapped productions
of these words result in an orthographic match but a phonological
mismatch. The flapped productions yielded priming effects
comparable to those of the typical productions, suggesting that both
phonology and orthographic characteristics influence spoken word
recognition.
(3065)
Learning New Phonological Variants in Spoken Word Recognition:
Episodes and Abstraction. ELENI N. PINNOW & CYNTHIA M.
CONNINE, SUNY, Binghamton—We investigated phonological variant
acquisition (schwa vowel deletion) for two- and three-syllable words
with high and low deletion rates. During training, schwa-deleted variants
were presented with a visual version. The test, a lexical decision
task, occurred without training (control) or with identical (repetition) or
new (transfer) words. Three-syllable words (low deletion) showed a repetition
effect, as compared with the control. Two-syllable low-deletion
words showed equivalent accuracy gains for repetition and transfer conditions.
The transfer effect for two-syllable low-deletion words was replicated
using segmentally matched training and test sets. A delay between
training and test did not eliminate training effects. Increased stimulus
repetition during training did not alter accuracy rates but facilitated responses
for low-deletion stimuli. Changing talker voice from training to
test did not alter accuracy or reaction time effects. Results are discussed
in terms of episodic and abstract representations of spoken words.
(3066)
Performance on a SPIN Task by Second-Language Learners: Effects
of Age of Acquisition and Time of Exposure. KIRSTEN M. WEST-
ERGARD & MAGDALENE H. CHALIKIA, Minnesota State University,
Moorhead—Age of acquisition and time of exposure may account
for different language abilities found among second-language
learners. Phonological representation may be a more sensitive measure
of age of acquisition, since speech-in-noise (SPIN) tasks have
previously helped differentiate native from nonnative listeners and
early from late bilinguals. College students and elementary school students
were given a SPIN task. High- and low-frequency words were
presented in silence and in noise. Time of exposure was a covariate.
College students perceived significantly fewer words in noise, relative
to the younger students, and fewer words in noise than in silence, a
finding that was not significant for the younger students. Our results
indicate that older students learning a language perform worse on a
SPIN task than younger students do. This supports previous hypotheses
that learning a language at a younger age can lead to a better
phonological representation of L2.
(3067)
Perceptual Adaptation to Spanish-Accented Speech. SABRINA K.
SIDARAS, Emory University, JENNIFER S. QUEEN, Rollins College,
& JESSICA E. DUKE & LYNNE C. NYGAARD, Emory University—
Recent research suggests that adult listeners are sensitive to talkerspecific
properties of speech and that perceptual processing of speech
changes as a function of exposure to and familiarity with these properties.
The present study investigates adult listeners’ perceptual learning
of talker- and accent-specific properties of spoken language.
Mechanisms involved in perceptual learning were examined by evaluating
the effects of exposure to foreign accented speech. Adult native
speakers of American English transcribed English words produced
by six native Spanish-speaking adults. Prior to this transcription
97
task, listeners were trained with items produced by Spanish-accented
talkers or with items produced by native speakers of American English,
or did not receive any training. Listeners were most accurate at
test if they had been exposed to Spanish-accented speech during training.
Similar results were found using sentence-length utterances. Even
with brief exposure, adult listeners perceptually adapt to both talkerspecific
and accent-general regularities in spoken language.
(3068)
The Time Course of Audiovisual Integration and Lexical Access:
Evidence From the McGurk Effect. LAWRENCE BRANCAZIO,
Southern Connecticut State University and Haskins Laboratories, JULIA
R. IRWIN, Haskins Laboratories, & CAROL A. FOWLER, Haskins
Laboratories and University of Connecticut—Previous findings demonstrated
lexical influences on the McGurk effect (visual influence on
heard speech with audiovisually discrepant stimuli). We exploited this
effect to test whether audiovisual integration precedes lexical activation.
Experiment 1 paired auditory words/nonwords (mesh, met; meck,
mep) with a visual spoken nonword (/nε/); participants sometimes
perceived words/nonwords (net, neck vs. nesh, nep) not present in either
modality. This McGurk effect was influenced by both auditory
lexicality (fewer /n/ responses for mesh, met than for meck, mep) and
integrated lexicality (more /n/ responses for meck [neck], met [net]
than for mesh [nesh], mep [nep]); the latter finding indicates that audiovisual
integration precedes lexical activation. Experiment 2 incorporated
audiovisual asynchrony to address the time course of these
processes. Auditory lead (100 msec) increased the auditory lexicality
effect without modulating the integrated lexicality effect, indicating
a complex relationship between uptake of auditory/visual phonetic information
and lexical access. Implications for speech perception models
are addressed.
(3069)
Motion Information Analogically Conveyed Through Acoustic
Properties of Speech. HADAS SHINTEL & HOWARD C. NUSBAUM,
University of Chicago—Language is generally thought of as conveying
meaning using arbitrary symbols, such as words. However, analogue
variation in the acoustic properties of speech can also convey
meaning (Shintel, Okrent, & Nusbaum, 2003). We examined whether
listeners routinely use speech rate as information about the motion of
a described object and whether they perceptually represent motion
conveyed exclusively through speech rate. Listeners heard a sentence
describing an object (e.g., The dog is brown) spoken quickly or slowly.
Listeners then saw an image of the object in motion or at rest. Listeners
were faster recognizing the object when speech rate was consistent
with the depicted motion in the picture. Results suggest that
listeners routinely use information conveyed exclusively through
acoustic properties of speech as a natural part of the comprehension
process and incorporate this information into a perceptual representation
of the described object.
(3070)
Recognition of Basic Emotions From Speech Prosody as a Function
of Language and Sex. MARC D. PELL, McGill University, SONJA
KOTZ & SILKE PAULMANN, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive
and Brain Sciences, & AREEJ ALASSERI, McGill University
(sponsored by Dorothee J. Chwilla)—This study investigated the vocal
expression of emotion in three distinct languages (German, English,
and Arabic) in order to understand factors that influence how listeners
of each language identify basic emotions from native spoken language
input. Two female and two male speakers of each language were
recorded producing a series of semantically anomalous “pseudosentences”
in seven distinct emotional tones, where the emotion was communicated
strictly through vocal-prosodic features of the utterance. A
group of 20 native listeners of each language then judged the intended
emotion represented by a randomized set of utterances elicited by
speakers of the native language in a perceptual judgment task. Findings
were analyzed both within and across languages in order to eval-