Nikole Giovannone
Word Recognition & Auditory Processing Lab
Villanova University

Why are some listeners more lexical than others?

Speech is an astoundingly complex signal. Even at the level of individual speech sounds there is enormous acoustic-phonetic variability both across and within speakers. Successful speech perception is often described in terms of finding a solution to this “lack of invariance problem”: Listeners can take multiple strategies to navigate this variability. Listeners can rely on bottom-up, acoustic-phonetic information, probabilistically matching acoustic features in the speech signal to the most likely speech sound categories. They can also make use of top-down lexical-semantic information to help shape perception and potentially resolve ambiguities. Do individuals vary in how they use these sources of information? If so, what makes individuals weight one source of information more highly than the other? I will discuss behavioral and electrophysiological results regarding how individual listeners weight different levels of linguistic information when solving the lack of invariance problem, as well as the potential mechanisms driving these individual differences.