The influence of acoustically manipulated similarity on exemplar effects

Abstract

In the first experiment of this study, participants adjusted the pitch differences between words through the resynthesis of fundamental frequency (f0) in order to find the acoustic correlates of increasing pitch differences. In the second experiment, these pitch differences were used to create conditions of decreasing similarity between prime and target stimuli. It was hypothesized that a larger decrease in similarity between prime and target would lead to larger decrease in priming than a smaller decrease in similarity. However, the results showed that only the smaller pitch difference between prime-target pairs was associated with a decrease in priming effect. The larger pitch difference did not seem to cause any decrease in priming effect whatsoever, let alone a greater decrease in priming than the smaller pitch difference.