Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

What makes a stimulus worthy of attention: Cue–outcome correlation and choice relevance in the learned predictiveness effect.
The learned predictiveness effect refers to the tendency for predictive cues to attract greater attention and show faster learning in subsequent tasks. However, in typical designs, the predictiveness of each cue (its objective cue–outcome correlation) is confounded with the degree to which it is informative for making the correct response on each trial (a feature we term choice relevance). In four experiments, we tested the unique contributions of cue–outcome correlation and choice relevance to the learned predictiveness effect by manipulating the outcome choices available on each trial. Experiments 1A and 1B compared two sets of partially predictive cues and found that participants learned more in a transfer phase about the set of cues that were previously choice-relevant. Experiments 2A and 2B used a design in which the cue–outcome correlation was stronger for one set of cues (perfect predictors) than the other set (imperfect predictors). Manipulating the choice relevance of the imperfect predictors in this design did not influence the magnitude of the learning bias toward the perfect predictor. Unlike cue–outcome correlation, choice relevance did not seem to correspond to biases in eye-gaze, suggesting that it operates via a distinct mechanism. Simulations with a modified EXIT model successfully predicted cue–outcome correlation and choice relevance effects by assuming that participants update learning for present outcomes only, but incorrectly predicted additive effects. We conclude that cue–outcome correlation and choice relevance are important factors that can lead to biases in future learning; both were individually sufficient but neither was necessary. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The role of spatial location in irrelevant speech revisited: A preregistered replication study.
The goal of the present investigation was to perform a registered replication of Jones and Macken’s (1995b) study, which showed that the segregation of a sequence of sounds to distinct locations reduced the disruptive effect on serial recall. Thereby, it postulated an intriguing connection between auditory stream segregation and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the irrelevant speech effect. Specifically, it was found that a sequence of changing utterances was less disruptive in stereophonic presentation, allowing each auditory object (letters) to be allocated to a unique location (right ear, left ear, center), compared to when the same sounds were played monophonically. Due to its importance for theoretical accounts of auditory distraction and because the results were somewhat equivocal, it is important to replicate this influential study with enhanced statistical power. The present replication (N = 60) confirmed that the disruptive effect of a changing-state sequence (“V-J-X”) as compared to a steady-state sequence (“J-J-J”)—the changing-state effect—is reduced significantly with stereophonic presentation, suggesting that listeners perceptually grouped the presented sound into three separate steady-state streams, which produce much less interference with seriation compared to the monophonic presentation. However, in contrast to the original study, stereophonic sequences tended to be slightly more disruptive than monophonic steady-state sequences, suggesting that the change in location may also cause some interference on its own. Moreover, there was also a significant steady-state effect, with both steady-state conditions being more disruptive than silence. The results are discussed with regard to interference-by-process and attentional accounts of auditory distraction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Pitting base rate driven heuristics against conditional reasoning in multivariate contingency assessment.
Contingency assessment is a major module of adaptive cognition and a prominent topic of ecological rationality. Virtually all influential theories assume that contingency estimates between Y and X are inferred from subjective conditional probabilities of focal Y levels given different X levels, p ( Y focal | X different levels ) . Yet, conditional probabilities are cognitively demanding, as Yfocal must be assessed separately for all levels of Xdifferent level. Pseudocontingencies (PCs) afford an alternative mechanism relying on base rates. In a PC, the more frequent level on one attribute appears contingent on the more frequent level on another attribute. When PCs are manipulated orthogonally to conditional probabilities, the former dominate the latter (Fiedler, 2010). PC dominance is shown in Experiments 1 and 1a to be particularly striking when a multivariate task setting calls for the assessment of all k·(k − 1)/2 pairwise contingencies between k attributes. Experiment 2 shows that contingency judgments are dissociated from evaluative conditioning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Phonetic retuning to idiosyncrasies in word onsets: The interplay of lexical context and prediction.
Listeners can use both lexical context (i.e., lexical knowledge activated by the word itself) and lexical predictions based on the content of a preceding sentence to adjust their phonetic categories to speaker idiosyncrasies. However, this phonetic retuning is difficult for listeners to achieve using lexical context when adjusting to idiosyncrasies in word onsets. In this situation, sentence context could help by boosting lexical knowledge. In a series of experiments, we tested for the interplay between lexical context and sentence context. Using the sentence-guided retuning paradigm from Jesse (2021), either a preceding sentence context or following lexical context disambiguated the perceptually ambiguous onset of short words as /s/ or /f/. At test, listeners categorized steps from an /sɑ/–/fɑ/ continuum. Evidence for phonetic retuning, in terms of more responses at test in line with prior disambiguation during exposure, was found when sentence context had disambiguated the critical sound during exposure. In contrast, lexical knowledge activated by the word itself only produced trends across a subset of steps. When sentence and lexical context disambiguated the idiosyncrasy in the same words, the change of the overall retuning effect across steps followed the pattern observed in the experiment with only lexical disambiguation. Furthermore, this modulation of the retuning effect was not observed when sentence and lexical context disambiguated the idiosyncrasy in different items. This pattern of results suggests an interplay between these two types of contexts. Sentence context therefore helps with retuning to talker idiosyncrasies in word onsets when the lexical context can fail listeners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Coronal underspecification as an emerging property in the development of speech processing.
Is the developing lexicon phonologically detailed or are representations underspecified? Experimental results from toddlers suggest phonological specificity. By contrast, the featurally underspecified lexicon theory (Lahiri, 2018; Lahiri & Reetz, 2010), motivated by evidence such as the cross-linguistic prevalence of phenomena such as coronal assimilation (rainbow → rai[m]bow), proposes that coronal sounds are unspecified for place of articulation even in the adult lexicon. The featurally underspecified lexicon, therefore, predicts that asymmetries in mispronunciation sensitivity are also present in the developing lexicon. Recent research (Ren et al., 2019) has rejected this, reporting similar sensitivity to mispronunciation of coronals and noncoronals at 19 months. Using a more sensitive experimental paradigm, we provide new evidence demonstrating a lack of asymmetries at 18 months, but mispronunciation sensitivity for coronals disappears by 24 months. In an intermodal preferential looking study, growth curve analysis shows that 18-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of words with a coronal (e.g., duck vs. *buck) and noncoronal (e.g., bird vs. *dird) onset. At 24 months, mispronunciations of coronal-onset words were treated just like the accurate pronunciations. We conclude that coronals are underspecified in the developing lexicon at 24 months. We propose a model under which initial representations are phonetic in nature and require exact acoustic input, whereas phonological coronal underspecification at the lexical level emerges gradually as a result of exposure to variation in the input such as coronal assimilations that only become detectable patterns with growing lexical and segmentation skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Intonation adaptation to multiple talkers.
Speech intonation conveys a wealth of linguistic and social information, such as the intention to ask a question versus make a statement. However, due to the considerable variability in our speaking voices, the mapping from meaning to intonation can be many-to-many and often ambiguous. Previous studies suggest that the comprehension system resolves this ambiguity, at least in part, by adapting to recent exposure. However, these studies have largely been limited to single-talker exposure, leaving open how listeners adapt to input from multiple talkers. Four experiments herein address this question. Listeners were exposed to a male and/or female talker producing statements (“It’s raining.”) and declarative questions (“It’s raining?”). After exposure, listeners categorized the utterances of both talkers (Experiments 1–3) or a novel test talker (Experiment 4) as statements or questions. In all four experiments, intonation adaptation was found, and it was neither strictly talker-dependent nor strictly talker-independent. While listeners tracked production patterns unique to each talker, adaptation sometimes generalized across talkers. We relate these findings to research on segmental speech perception, which has found that talker-dependence is conditioned on phonetic contrast or cue distributions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Lexicosemantic prediction in native speakers of English and Swedish-speaking learners of english: An event-related potential study.
The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate lexicosemantic prediction in native speakers (L1) of English and advanced second language (L2) learners of English with Swedish as their L1. The main goal of the study was to examine whether learners recruit predictive mechanisms to the same extent as L1 speakers when a change in the linguistic environment renders prediction a useful strategy to pursue. The study, which uses a relatedness proportion paradigm adapted from Lau et al. (2013), focuses on the N400, an ERP component that is sensitive to the ease of lexical access/retrieval, including lexical prediction. Participants read 800 prime–target pairs, presented word by word and divided into two blocks, while they searched for animal words. Unknown to them, some of the pairs were semantically associated, which is known to reduce the amplitude of the N400 via spreading semantic activation. Most importantly, the proportion of semantically related pairs increased in the second experimental block (via fillers), thereby increasing the reliability of the primes as predictive cues and encouraging prediction. Results from 36 L1-English speakers and 53 L2 learners showed an N400 reduction for related (remain-stay ) relative to unrelated targets (silver-stay ) across blocks. Crucially, this N400 reduction for related targets was significantly larger in the block that encouraged prediction, in both L1 and L2 speakers, consistent with the possibility that both groups recruited similar predictive mechanisms when the context encouraged prediction. These results suggest that, at high levels of proficiency, L2 speakers engage similar predictive strategies to L1 speakers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The influence of complete and partial shared translation in the first language on semantic processing in the second language.
This study investigated (a) whether L2 semantic processing is modulated by automatic activation of L1 translations, (b) whether L1 translation activation involves both phonological and orthographic representations, and (c) whether these phonological and orthographic representations of L1 translations are accessed along a similar time course. To this end, 48 Hebrew–English bilinguals and 48 native English speakers with no Hebrew knowledge performed a semantic relatedness judgment task in English. Critical prime–target pairs (n = 96) were semantically unrelated, but their translations in Hebrew could include form overlap. Specifically, complete translation-overlap pairs shared both a phonological and an orthographic lexical form (e.g., “beak” and “source” = מקור /makor/), whereas partial translation-overlap pairs shared either a phonological form (e.g., “skin” and “light” = /or/) or an orthographic form (e.g., “book” and “barber” = ספר) in Hebrew. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of the prime–target L2-English words was further manipulated to reveal the time course of phonological and orthographic translation activation. Results showed that complete overlap in the translation lead Hebrew–English bilinguals, but not native English speakers, to judge semantically unrelated pairs as related in meaning and to do so more quickly irrespective of SOA. For partial translation overlap in phonology, the percentage of “yes” responses was affected only in the short SOA (300 ms), and under partial translation overlap in orthography, only in the long SOA (750 ms). These findings suggest that L1 translation activation during L2 word processing spreads to both phonological and orthographic representations but at different time points along processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition - Vol 50, Iss 12