Perceptual Associations Between Words and Speaker Age

Recognition proficiency was measured in a lexical decision experiment using Korean words including ones that are stereotypically associated with younger or older people. Both accuracy rates and response times were significantly improved when a word was spoken in a voice whose age matched the age category of the word based on stereotype-based age rating. Accuracy rates were also significantly improved when a word was spoken in a voice whose age matched the frequency-based age category, although the effect on response times was marginal. The results are discussed in the context of an exemplar-based account incorporating social exemplar activation. First, the activation of social information is influenced by distributional properties of lexical use across social groups, indicating that social information of speakers is not only linked to sub-lexical representations as shown in previous studies, but also directly linked to lexical representations through social indices. Furthermore, the presence of an additional effect of stereotypes expands our understanding of the speech perception mechanism, suggesting that the social indices are enhanced by stereotypical associations between words and age categories. When listening to words with a wide spectrum of age-related variability, word-stereotypes activate social information, guiding to the lexical representations via social indices.