Abstract:

Recent evidence suggests that lexical items are stored in memory as detailed exemplars that encode specific information about characteristics of speaker's voice. Lyons and Luce (1996) found that an incongruity in talker's voice (male/female) in an explicit recognition task led to slowed reaction times for college-aged participants. While this finding suggests that speaker information is preserved in stored exemplars, it can be asked whether lexical representations of aged individuals are equally detailed. Namely, it has been suggested that with age, phonological representations become more abstract or holistic in nature. If this is true, then a mismatch in talker voice should not affect the performance of aged participants. In order to explore this hypothesis, aged and college participants were tested in an explicit memory task. Preliminary results suggest that older adults are, in fact, more rather than less sensitive to variations in the surface characteristics of spoken words.