Knowledge Bank

Studies have shown that when a word in a sentence is hard to recognize, a listener relies on context occurring subsequent to the word in order to accurately identify the word. For example, when someone talking on the phone said The wing had feathers but the listener only heard The *ing had feathers due to cell-phone interference, the listener will tend to focus on following context (e.g., feathers) to understand it was the “wing” that "had feathers" rather than "thing" or "ring". The current study explores whether a listener will rely on following context if the target word (e.g., wing) was spoken by one talker and the following word (e.g., feathers) was spoken by another talker. Results show that the talker change neither weakens nor strengthens the influence of subsequent context on ambiguity resolution.