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Abstract:
This study investigated repetition priming in the recognition
of famous voices, recording reaction times (RTs) and event-related
brain potentials (ERPs). In Experiment 1, a facilitation was found
in RTs to famous but not to unfamiliar voices when these had been
primed by a different voice sample of the same speaker earlier in
the experiment. However, ERPs to both famous and unfamiliar voices
showed repetition priming in terms of an increased P2 component,
which is thought to be generated in the auditory cortex. When the
likelihood of conscious retrieval of primes was reduced in
Experiment 2, facilitatory priming in RTs was again observed for
famous voices, but inhibitory priming was now observed for
unfamiliar voices. This is consistent with predictions of a bias
model of priming. Moreover, substantial priming was observed even
when voice primes were backward speech samples which were
recognized at chance levels. The results suggests that (a) voice
priming is mediated to a large extent by frequency characteristics
of a particular voice, rather than by phonetic features that are
eliminated in backward speech, (b) priming affects the processing
of voices in auditory cortical areas within 200 ms after voice
onset, and (c) explicit recognition of a voice in the priming phase
is not a necessary condition for priming to occur.
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