Phonetic stability predicts individual differences in acoustic–phonetic cue weighting

Abstract

When processing speech, not every listener relies to the same degree on the various available types of information. It is unknown, however, whether differences in cue reliance reflect chronic or task-specific preferences of the individual. In a two-session study, we assessed how reliance on top-down (semantic) and bottom-up (acoustic–phonetic) cues differed across individuals in a cue-weighting task and how these patterns of cue weighting related to other independent measures of top-down and bottom-up cue use. We assessed semantic cue weighting by measuring semantic priming in a lexical decision task and we assessed the stability and gradience of listeners’ acoustic–phonetic sensitivity using a visual analogue scale task on two phonetic contrasts. We found that individuals who relied more on bottom-up cues when listening to sentences also had more consistent response patterns in our phonetic task. This finding suggests that individuals who rely more on acoustic–phonetic information when listening to sentences may do so because they have more stable low-level representations. Additionally, these results provide external validity as to the types of individual differences measures we assess, particularly in more naturalistic, sentence-listening contexts.