Renata Solum The time-course of speaker attribute

Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, perception during spoken word

College of Liberal Arts, 2011 recognition
Mentor: Benjamin Munson, PhD;
Department of Speech-Language-
Hearing Sciences

Spoken language conveys multiple types of information simultaneously, including A 1.5 inch
both a linguistic message and attributes about the speaker who produced it. As a
listener perceives a speech signal, he or she processes the different layers of
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information at different stages. For example, semantic information is activated photo of
early in the time-course of perception relative to phonological information you.
(Schriefers, Meyer, & Levelt, 1990). Another type of information available in a
speech stream is indexical information, which includes parameters such as talker
age, regional dialect, and gender. In this project, we completed a cross-modal
priming experiment in which listeners were instructed to identify talker gender
based on auditory stimuli alone. Visual interferers were pictures of men, women,
or a neutral stimulus presented 150ms before, concurrent with, or 150ms after
each auditory stimulus. Response times for gendered stimuli relative to neutral stimulus conditions were
compared at each of the stimulus onset asynchronies. Results indicate that for female talkers, talker gender is
activated late in processing. The magnitude of facilitation or inhibition effects also varied with talker sex typicality
for female talkers. Specifically, indexical interference had the greatest influence for the less-prototypical female
talker. Neither of these effects were very pronounced for male talkers, indicating that visual interferers interacted
differently with male versus female auditory stimuli. This research demonstrates that cross-modal priming is a
useful, if limited, paradigm for exploring the time-course of speaker attribute perception.

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