Meghan Sumner

The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception

Frontiers in Psychology · 2014-01-01 · 263 citations

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing…

Beyond lexical meaning: The effect of emotional prosody on spoken word recognition

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017-07-01 · 32 citations

This study employs an auditory-visual associative priming paradigm to test whether non-emotional words uttered in emotional prosody (e.g., pineapple spoken in angry prosody or happy prosody) facilitate recognition of semantically emotional words (e.g., mad, upset or smile, joy). The results show an affective priming effect between emotional prosody and emotional words independent of lexical carriers of the prosody. Learned acoustic patterns in speech (e.g., emotional prosody) map directly to soc…

The social weight of spoken words

Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2015-04-22 · 30 citations

The episodic encoding of talker voice attributes across diverse voices

Journal of Memory and Language · 2022 · 25 citations

In this study, we replicated and extended Experiment 1 of Palmeri et al. (1993) in two experiments. Using the continuous recognition memory paradigm, we investigated effects of a demographically heterogeneous set of talkers varying across race, gender, and regional accent (Exp. 1) and effects of two demographically homogeneous sets of talkers (8 identifiably white male or 8 identifiably Black male talkers) across two listener populations (white and Black listeners) (Exp. 2). Words repeated in th…

Speech patterns during memory recall relates to early tau burden across adulthood

Alzheimer s & Dementia · 2024 · 22 citations

INTRODUCTION: Early cognitive decline may manifest in subtle differences in speech. METHODS: We examined 238 cognitively unimpaired adults from the Framingham Heart Study (32-75 years) who completed amyloid and tau PET imaging. Speech patterns during delayed recall of a story memory task were quantified via five speech markers, and their associations with global amyloid status and regional tau signal were examined. RESULTS: Total utterance time, number of between-utterance pauses, speech rate, a…