Processing indexical information demands resources: Evidence from the change deafness paradigm.

Abstract

Information about talker identity, referred to as indexical information, and the way it is processed in spoken word recognition is a topic of much debate. Current theories of spoken word recognition suggest indexical information is either removed entirely or encoded in its entirety. Recent research found that the amount of time spent processing the speech stream affects the amount of indexical information available to a listener. These effects suggest that the processing of indexical information is a resource demanding process. The current study uses the change deafness paradigm to examine both explicitly and implicitly the ability of participants to accurately detect a change between two speakers at the conclusion of an auditory lexical decision task. The results demonstrate that variable rates of processing affect the participants' ability to accurately detect a change in speaker, suggesting that the processing of indexical information is a resource demanding process.