The effect of the degree of acoustical distortion on lexical access by younger adults

Authors

  • Marco Colette Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Rd N., Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada
  • Marianne Pelletier Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Rd N., Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada
  • Renée Giroux Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Rd N., Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada
  • Huiwen Goy Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Rd N., Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada
  • Kathy Pichora-Fuller Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto, 3359 Mississauga Rd N., Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada

Keywords:

Information theory, Speed, Acoustical informations, Degree of distortions, Encoding, Filtering, Linguistic informations, Low-pass, Priming effects, Response times, Semantic contexts

Abstract

A study was conducted to investigate how the speed of processing a sentence-final target word is influenced by varying the degree of acoustic distortion applied to three different types of sentence contexts, including semantically congruent, semantically incongruent, and semantically neutral. The results of the study showed that acoustically distorting the semantic context using low-pass filtering disrupts the encoding of linguistic information as evidenced by changes in the speed of lexical decision for a following target word that was spoken without distortion. The extended response times arising from the low-pass filtering contributed to a smaller facilitation priming effect, which varied with the degree of distortion that was applied. The study concluded that the amount and/or quality of available acoustical information seems to be more important to lexical access and lexical decision operations that is the type of distortion.

Additional Files

Published

2008-09-01

How to Cite

1.
Colette M, Pelletier M, Giroux R, Goy H, Pichora-Fuller K. The effect of the degree of acoustical distortion on lexical access by younger adults. Canadian Acoustics [Internet]. 2008 Sep. 1 [cited 2024 Nov. 7];36(3):110-1. Available from: https://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2062

Issue

Section

Proceedings of the Acoustics Week in Canada

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