Differences in the recognition of careful and casual speech

Previous work in spoken word recognition and speech perception has shown two seemingly conflicting patterns. While some studies have shown a processing benefit for more frequent word variants (i.e., in a casual speech mode), others have found a benefit for more canonical word forms (i.e., in a careful speech mode). This study aims to reconcile these findings, proposing that different types of processing apply to each speech mode–top-down processing for casual speech, and bottom-up for careful speech. Listeners in an auditory priming task heard natural (non-spliced) sentences spoken in either a careful or casual speech mode. The final word of the auditory prime was either semantically predictable from the preceding sentence context or unpredictable. After the audio prime, listeners responded in a lexical decision task to a visual probe: either the final word heard in the prime, an unrelated word, or a nonword. Preliminary results suggest that, regardless of speech style, reaction times are faster for relat...