Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study investigated task-general and task-specific effects of phonological and lexico-semantic word properties on auditory word identification and auditory lexical decision. The data comprised identification accuracy and lexical decision latencies from the Auditory English Lexicon Project (AELP). Item-level regressions were performed for 20 word properties across each of the six talkers available in the database. Task-general effects that were consistently robust across both tasks revealed that words that were more familiar, prevalent, and structurally distinctive were recognized faster and identified more accurately. The effects of frequency, concreteness, arousal, and number of morphemes were consistently specific only to lexical decision and were not robust for word identification. These findings highlight the utility of using the AELP data to conduct six replications across talkers from different regions and genders to test the robustness and generalizability of specific word properties' influences on spoken word processing.