Speaker: John Kingston (UMass Amherst)
Title: When Do Words Influence Perception? Converging Evidence that the Ganong Effect is Early
Date: Thursday, February 11
Time: 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
(joint work with Amanda Rysling, Adrian Staub, Andrew Cohen, and Jeffrey Starns)
Ganong (1980, JEP:HPP, 6, 110-125) first showed that listeners prefer to
categorize ambiguous stimuli from a word-nonword continuum with the
category corresponding to the word endpoint. Fox (1984, JEP:HPP 10,
526-540) showed that this preference, the so-called “Ganong effect,” was
stronger in slower than faster responses, perhaps because it takes time
for a word to be activated and for that activation to feed back on the
phonemic decision process. Subsequent work has failed to replicate Fox’s
finding (see Pitt & Samuel, 1993, JEP:HPP, 19, 699-725, for additional
evidence and a metanalysis). We present evidence using four different
designs, free response, response signal, eye tracking, and gating, that
words are instead activated and influence categorization as soon as the
listener hears supporting acoustic evidence.