Effects of Working Memory Capacity and "Autistic" Traits on Phonotactic Effects in Speech Perception

Individual differences in cognitive processing style have recently been hypothesized as an important source of systematic variability in speech processing. This study offers further evidence in support of this hypothesis by showing that variability in cognitive processing style, as measured by differences in working memory capacity and “autistic” traits, significantly influences listeners’ response to the effect of phonotactics in speech perception. As listeners’ failure to properly normalize for context-induced variation has been taken to be a major source of innovative linguistic variants, individual variability in cognitive processing style stands to be a significant source of systematic variation in language.

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