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Abstract:
Auditory identity priming experiments generally show that participants respond more quickly and accurately to stimuli which
are repeated with similar phonetic characteristics (Goldinger, 1996). Usually, researchers separate matching and mismatching
priming conditions using a perceptual difference that spans multiple phonetic dimensions. For instance, speaker identity is not
only reflected in fundamental frequency (F0), but also involves a particular voice-quality and speaker-specific articulations.
Such complex variation cannot be precisely controlled in an experiment. Consequently, little is known about how acoustic
variation affects spoken word processing by increasing perceptual distance. Our study explores this relationship by defining
perceptual distance on a single acoustic dimension: F0.
Our first experiment investigated whether an F0 difference between otherwise identical primes and targets affects
participants’ response times in a lexical decision task (N=32). The F0 shift was implemented using PSOLA resynthesis
(Moulines & Charpentier, 1990) and was measured in ERB (Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth; Greenwood, 1990) to retain
perceptually comparable intonation contours across repetitions. Statistical analysis showed that listeners responded
significantly faster to target stimuli when the F0 was identical to the corresponding primes.
In a second experiment we will assess the impact of increased perceptual distance between mismatching repetitions.
In a separate rating experiment (N=18) we determined the F0 difference that was perceptually double the size of the
difference between mismatching repetitions in Experiment 1. Data acquisition for the second priming experiment is currently
ongoing; results of the combined experiments will be presented at the workshop.
