The episodic encoding of spoken words in Hindi

Abstract

The discovery that listeners more accurately identify words repeated in the same voice than in a different voice has had an enormous influence on models of representation and speech perception. Widely replicated in English, we understand little about whether and how this effect generalizes across languages. In a continuous recognition memory study with Hindi speakers and listeners (N = 178), we replicated the talker-specificity effect for accuracy-based measures (hit rate and D′), and found the latency advantage to be marginal (p = 0.06). These data help us better understand talker-specificity effects cross-linguistically and highlight the importance of expanding work to less studied languages.