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Abstract

Subjects decided whether successive auditory stimuli were the same word or not in an RT task. Same decisions tended to be faster when the second stimuli was physically identical. Intonation change and, even more, speaker change slowed some decisions. These voice effects were contributed by the slower responders and they disappeared over the six sessions of testing. Increasing the delay between the stimulus pair slowed RT but delay did not interact with voicing. These results suggest that the auditory analogy with visual physical and name codes is misleading. Non-linguistic information from the speech signal survives in various forms but this fact does not entail the existence of a literal physical code in audition.

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Physical and Name Codes in Auditory Memory: The Pursuit of an Analogy

Abstract

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References