Paul A. Luce
Emily A. Lyons
Language Perception Lab., Dept. of Psychol., Park Hall, State Univ. of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260
Much recent research [e.g., Goldinger (1993)] has suggested that representations of spoken words in memory are veridical exemplars that encode specific information, such as characteristics of the talker's voice. This exemplar account of phonetic form representations was examined in an experiment in which subjects heard two lists of words. The words in the first list were spoken by both a male and a female speaker. The words in the second list were (1) repetitions of words in the first list spoken by the same talker, (2) repetitions of words spoken by a different talker, or (3) new words. Subjects always made lexical decision responses to the stimuli in the first list. For the second list, subjects in one condition again made lexical decision responses; subjects in another condition performed a recognition task. Results indicated that changing the voice of the talker across lists had no effect on the repetition priming effect when subjects made lexical decisions to the second list. However, in the recognition task, reaction times were faster if the voice of the talker was preserved. These results are consistent with an exemplar-based account for recognition but also implicate the role of more abstract representations in identification. [Work supported by NIDCD.]