Effects of repetition priming and word familiarity on perception of spectrally degraded spoken words

摘要

Priming effects in the auditory domain have been demonstrated by several studies. Our previous studies examined effects of linguistic knowledge on perception of spectrally degraded spoken words, where the speech signal was replaced by bands of noise while its temporal amplitude envelope preserved (noise-vocoded speech sounds, NVSS), by using direct priming paradigm. Participants were required to identify the degraded words presented auditorily, and priming effects were observed in both familiar and unfamiliar words. In the present study, we used the auditory priming paradigm to generalize what were found in the previous studies and examined the auditory priming effects on perceiving words. In the study phase, natural speech sounds were presented from a loudspeaker and after a distractor task for about 10 minutes, participants were given implicit tests all together, during which participants listened to NVSS words and were asked to identify the words. Consistent with the previous findings, the performance for the studied words were significantly higher than non-studied words for both familiar and unfamiliar words, indicating that priming effects were observed in the auditory perception of NVSS words. The results suggest that the auditory implicit memory would contribute to the perception of spoken words.