TexasScholarWorks
    • Login
    • Submit
    View Item 
    •   Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    • Repository Home
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Modality-specific effects of processing fluency on cognitive judgments

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    SOUZA-DISSERTATION.pdf (4.436Mb)
    Date
    2012-05
    Author
    Souza, André Luiz Elias de
    Share
     Facebook
     Twitter
     LinkedIn
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Fluency of processing – the ease with which one extracts information from stimuli – affects a variety of cognitive processes over and above the influence of declarative content. Although this influence has been extensively demonstrated in a variety of different domains (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), there are virtually no studies exploring this effect with auditory material. Moreover, although research on modality differences suggests that people process auditory information differently than they process visual or written information (Conway & Gathercole, 1987; Markman, Taylor & Gentner, 2007), there are no studies that directly compare the effects of processing fluency on judgments across different modalities. The current dissertation reports two sets of studies, one investigating the effects of processing fluency on cognitive judgments in the auditory modality, and a second exploring cross-modal differences in processing fluency. The first set of studies showed that although foreign-accented speech is more difficult to process, this disfluency does not affect cognitive judgments. In the second set of studies, two experiments show that disfluency in processing affects judgments of truth (Experiment 1) and the intention to purchase a product (Experiment 2) only with written – non-verbal – material. Experiment 3 investigates one possible explanation for the limited influence of processing fluency in speech: because people tend to focus on conceptual information over low-level acoustic information when processing language (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Gow & Gordon, 1995; Mattys, White & Melhorn, 2005; Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 1995), distortions to the superficial features of the speech signal is likely to have limited impact on how people process the conceptual content. In Experiment 3 participants are primed to attend to the superficial features of foreign-accented speech. The results showed that when people are primed to attend to features that make foreign-accented speech difficult, non-native speech has an impact on subsequent judgments of truth. Overall, the studies presented here show that listeners can extract content from speech, even when it is distorted. They also show that when attention is directed to low-level acoustic features of speech, processing fluency effects becomes apparent.
    Department
    Psychology
    Description
    text
    Subject
    Accent
    Processing fluency
    Modality
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2012-05-5235
    Collections
    • UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin

     

     

    Browse

    Entire RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartmentsThis CollectionDate IssuedAuthorsTitlesSubjectsDepartments

    My Account

    Login

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Information

    About Contact Policies Getting Started Glossary Help FAQs

    University of Texas at Austin Libraries
    • facebook
    • twitter
    • instagram
    • youtube
    • CONTACT US
    • MAPS & DIRECTIONS
    • JOB OPPORTUNITIES
    • UT Austin Home
    • Emergency Information
    • Site Policies
    • Web Accessibility Policy
    • Web Privacy Policy
    • Adobe Reader
    Subscribe to our NewsletterGive to the Libraries

    © The University of Texas at Austin