Speaker effects in spoken language comprehension
This addresses the problem of understanding language processing mechanisms for psycholinguists and language learners, but it is incremental as it reviews and integrates existing findings into a model.
The paper tackles the problem of how speaker identity influences spoken language comprehension, proposing an integrative model that combines bottom-up acoustic perception and top-down expectation-based processes to explain effects on perception and interpretation. It contributes to psycholinguistic theory by offering a comprehensive framework for how speaker information interacts with linguistic content.
The identity of a speaker significantly influences spoken language comprehension by affecting both perception and expectation. This review explores speaker effects, focusing on how speaker information impacts language processing. We propose an integrative model featuring the interplay between bottom-up perception-based processes driven by acoustic details and top-down expectation-based processes driven by a speaker model. The acoustic details influence lower-level perception, while the speaker model modulates both lower-level and higher-level processes such as meaning interpretation and pragmatic inferences. We define speaker-idiosyncrasy and speaker-demographics effects and demonstrate how bottom-up and top-down processes interact at various levels in different scenarios. This framework contributes to psycholinguistic theory by offering a comprehensive account of how speaker information interacts with linguistic content to shape message construction. We suggest that speaker effects can serve as indices of a language learner's proficiency and an individual's characteristics of social cognition. We encourage future research to extend these findings to AI speakers, probing the universality of speaker effects across humans and artificial agents.