Deborah A. Gagnon
Moss Rehab. Res. Inst., 1200 W. Tabor Rd., Philadelphia, PA 19141
The type of information stored in memory for speech sounds was tested using a primed, speeded classification task. The relationship between prime and target was varied in terms of phoneme constituency, phoneme order, or both. Primes were presented either auditorally or visually, allowing for a contrast between perceptual and imaged speech codes. Two other manipulations were made to assess whether the temporal nature of the stimuli, the stimulus quality, or possibly both, play a role in determining imageability: (1) Stimuli either contained stop (dynamically cued) or fricative (relatively statically cued) consonants; and (2) stimuli were either natural or synthetic. Inhibitory effects were found when an auditory prime was presented at a 100-ms ISI, supporting earlier evidence for a positionally specific perceptual speech code (Gagnon and Sawusch, 1992). It was also found that both the manipulation of the type of consonant (stop versus fricative) present in the target and the quality of the stimulus set (natural versus synthetic) had an effect on imageability, supporting both a temporal nature (Surprenant, 1992) and stimulus quality account of imageability. These results will be discussed within the context of current theories of memory, imagery, and speech perception. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant R01 DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo and Mark Diamond Research Fund grant to Deborah A. Gagnon.]