People can change how they use perceptual memory to understand speech on the fly

What is it about?

When you listen to someone speak, you use many sources of information to understand what they’re saying. For example, suppose you hear someone say “After we noticed the dent in the fender, we sold the car.” You understand that they said the word "dent", as opposed to a similar-sounding word like "tent", not just because of the sounds on the word itself, but also because of the context later in the sentence. While this might seem like a simple process, keeping track of and integrating all the sources of information for all the sounds and words in a sentence puts a strain on our short-term memory resources. In this study, we asked whether people can strategically adapt how much they engage in this process. We did this by having our research participants listen to sentences where keeping track of information didn’t actually pay off for their understanding, such as: “After we noticed the dent, we continued on our way.” In such a sentence, the context (“… we continued on our way”) leaves open whether the earlier word was "dent" or, for instance, "tent". After hearing dozens of these sentences, we then re-introduced sentences that did have relevant context; however, the participants no longer used the context in their judgments about the words they heard as much, and instead relied almost entirely on the sounds of the word. These results suggest that people can learn how useful different sources of information are, and strategically re-allocate how they use their memory during language comprehension.

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Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study sheds light on how people use their cognitive resources, like memory, in language understanding. Research has often assumed that people can’t keep track of speech input at a detailed level. Only in the past few years have studies like ours begun to suggest that people not only can integrate information across time, they can also do so strategically based on their current circumstances.