When a 50-year-old man says the name Rex, he pronounces the vowel with a lot of intensity at 500 Hz. When a 7-year-old girl says the name Rex, she pronounces the vowel without a strong component in the frequency range around 500 Hz. You have no trouble hearing both of their speech as examples of the same word. This phenomenon is known as
A) perceptual invariance.
B) simultaneous activation of multiple word meanings.
C) incremental language processing.
D) crossmodal priming.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

This phenomenon is known as perceptual invariance, which refers to the ability to recognize the same word spoken by different speakers despite variations in the acoustic signal.

When a 50-Year-Old Man Says the Name Rex, He Pronounces