Emily A. Lyons
Language Perception Lab., Dept. of Psych., Park Hall, SUNY, Buffalo, NY 14260
Recent research (e.g., Goldinger, 1993) has suggested that representations of spoken words in memory may be veridical exemplars that encode instance-specific information, such as characteristics of the talker's voice. This account of spoken word recognition was examined in work presented at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society (Luce and Lyons, 1994). Evidence was presented in support of the claim that exemplar-type representations are used in explicit recognition memory tasks, but that more abstract representations play a role in tasks such as lexical decision. However, the previous work did not make clear the explicitness of the information encoded in exemplar-type representations; specifically whether only gross factors such as talker variation are encoded, or whether within speaker variation is also encoded. The present research expands on these previous results by comparing the effects of talker variation and same-speaker token variation on a repetition priming and an explicit recognition memory task. [Work supported by NIDCD.]