Theodore Rachel M, Blumstein Sheila E, Luthra Sahil
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Connecticut, Unit 1085, Storrs, CT, 06269-1085, USA,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Jul;77(5):1674-84. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-0854-0.
Findings in the domain of spoken word recognition have indicated that lexical representations contain both abstract and episodic information. It has been proposed that processing time determines when each source of information is recruited, with increased processing time being required to access lower-frequency episodic instantiations. The time-course hypothesis of specificity effects has thus identified a strong role for retrieval mechanisms mediating the use of abstract versus episodic information. Here we conducted three recognition memory experiments to examine whether the findings previously attributed to retrieval mechanisms might instead reflect attention during encoding. The results from Experiment 1 showed that talker-specificity effects emerged when subjects attended to the individual speakers, but not when they attended to lexical characteristics, during encoding, even though processing times at retrieval were equivalent. The results from Experiment 2 showed that talker-specificity effects emerged when listeners attended to talker gender but not when they attended to syntactic characteristics, even though the processing times at retrieval were significantly longer in the latter condition. The results from Experiment 3 showed no talker-specificity effects when all listeners attended to lexical characteristics, even when processing at retrieval was slowed by the addition of background noise. Collectively, these results suggest that when processing time during retrieval is decoupled from encoding factors, it fails to predict the emergence of talker-specificity effects. Rather, attention during encoding appears to be the putative variable.
口语单词识别领域的研究结果表明，词汇表征包含抽象信息和情景信息。有人提出，处理时间决定了何时调用每种信息源，访问低频情景实例需要更长的处理时间。特异性效应的时间进程假说因此确定了检索机制在介导抽象信息与情景信息使用方面的重要作用。在此，我们进行了三项识别记忆实验，以检验先前归因于检索机制的结果是否可能反而反映了编码过程中的注意力。实验1的结果表明，在编码过程中，当受试者关注个体说话者时会出现说话者特异性效应，但当他们关注词汇特征时则不会出现，尽管检索时的处理时间相同。实验2的结果表明，当听众关注说话者性别时会出现说话者特异性效应，但当他们关注句法特征时则不会出现，尽管在后一种情况下检索时的处理时间明显更长。实验3的结果表明，当所有听众都关注词汇特征时，即使检索时的处理因添加背景噪声而减慢，也不会出现说话者特异性效应。总体而言，这些结果表明，当检索时的处理时间与编码因素脱钩时，它无法预测说话者特异性效应的出现。相反，编码过程中的注意力似乎是假定的变量。
