Rapid Influence of Word-Talker Associations on Lexical Access

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Phonetics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Previous research indicates voice-age congruence aids word identification in English and Korean.
• Prior studies presented stimuli blocked by talker age, allowing expectation formation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if voice-age congruence effects on word recognition persist without pre-stimulus talker age cues.
• To replicate previous findings in a less constrained experimental design.

Main Methods:

• An experiment was conducted without blocking stimuli by talker age.
• Participants identified real words produced by voices congruent or incongruent with the word's typical user age.

Main Results:

• Word identification was faster when the voice age was congruent with the word's typical user.
• This effect was observed even when participants had no prior expectations about the talker's age.

Conclusions:

• Speech perception benefits from voice-age congruence, independent of listener expectations.
• Socio-indexical phonetic cues rapidly enhance lexical access by aligning with socio-indexical lexical information.