Now you hear me, later you don’t: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech

Abstract

(Accepted and In Press at Psychological Science)What happens to the acoustic signal after it enters the mind of a listener? Previous work demonstrates that listeners maintain intermediate representations over time. However, the internal structure of such representations—be they the acoustic-phonetic signal or more general information about the probability of possible categories—remains underspecified. We present two experiments using a novel speaker adaptation paradigm aimed at uncovering the format of speech representations. We exposed adult listeners (N=297) to a speaker whose utterances contained acoustically ambiguous information concerning phones/words and manipulated the temporal availability of disambiguating cues via visually presented text (i.e., presentation before or after each utterance). Results from a traditional phoneme categorization task showed that listeners adapt to a modified acoustic distribution when disambiguating text is provided before the audio, but not after. Results support the position that speech representations consist of activation over categories and are inconsistent with direct maintenance of the acoustic-phonetic signal.

Probabilistic social learning improves the public’s judgments of news veracity

“…An important area of future research is to investigate the extent to which these response scale effects are a result of how communication modalities interface with the cognitive structure of individuals' beliefs. For example, it may be that individuals' mental representations of news veracity are probabilistic in nature, such that binary signaling prevents them from expressing improvements in their internal beliefs during communication [34][35][36]. Future work may also find that, since individual cognition combines both categorical and probabilistic judgments, the optimal communication modality for social learning involves a combination of categorical and binary signaling [34][35][36][37].…”