Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language understanding requires listeners to quickly compresslarge amounts of perceptual information into abstract linguis-tic categories. Critical cues to those categories are distributedacross the speech signal, with some cues appearing substan-tially later. Speech perception would thus be facilitated if gra-dient sub-categorical representations of the input are main-tained in memory, allowing optimal cue integration. How-ever, indiscriminate maintenance of the high-dimensional sig-nal would tax memory systems. We hypothesize that speechperception balances these pressures by maintaining gradientrepresentations that are expected to facilitate category recog-nition. Two perception experiments test this hypothesis. Be-tween participants, an initial exposure phase manipulated theutility of information maintenance: in the High-Informativitygroup, following context always was informative; in the Low-Informativity group, following context always was uninforma-tive. A subsequent test phase measured the extent to whichparticipants maintained gradient representations. The Low-Informativity group showed less maintenance, compared to theHigh-Informativity group (Experiment 1). We then increasedthe task demands and made the targets of the manipulation lessobvious to participants (Experiment 2). We found a qualita-tively similar pattern. Together, these results suggest that lis-teners are capable of allocating memory to gradient representa-tions of the speech input based on the expected utility of thoserepresentations.