Using eye‐tracking and long‐term repetition‐priming to examine talker‐effects in spoken word recognition.

Our research examines the circumstances in which talker variability affects listeners’ perception of spoken words. In our previous work, we used the long‐term repetition‐priming paradigm in which listeners were presented with two blocks of spoken words. Some words were repeated from one block to the next and some words heard during the second block had not been presented during the first block. We found that repeated words were responded to more quickly than new words (a repetition‐priming effect). Moreover, repeated words spoken by the same talker in both blocks were responded to more quickly than repeated words spoken by different talkers (a talker‐effect). Crucially, talker‐effects emerged relatively late during perceptual processing. In the current study, we extended our previous work by using the eye‐tracking paradigm and by investigating whether an attentional manipulation would modulate the role that talker variability plays during the perception of spoken words. Because eye‐tracking has been shown...