The Effect of Speaker's Voice on Word Recognition

Although it is generally believed that the representational characteristics of verbal stimuli (typescript or speaker's voice, for example) persist for a very brief time in sensory memory, some recent studies suggest that such characteristics may persist much longer. The present experiments show that words are recognized faster and more accurately when they are re-presented in the same voice. This same-voice facilitation did not decline over a 2-min lag. Further experiments showed that subjects could recall the voice in which a word had been presented with 65–75% accuracy after 2 min and 31 intervening items. It is concluded that, in some circumstances, the physical features of verbal stimuli persist in memory for several minutes.