The time-course of talker-specificity and lexical competition effects during word learning

Three experiments examined the time-course of talker-specificity and lexical competition effects during spoken word learning. Talker-specificity effects depend on access to highly detailed lexical representations, whilst lexical competition may exploit more abstract representations. By tracking the time-courses of these effects concurrently we examined whether there was a common mechanism underlying their storage and retention. Talker-specificity effects on recognition of novel words were robust immediately after study and were generally stable over the course of a week. In contrast, lexical competition effects emerged only at delayed test points. This time-course dissociation supports a dual-system model of lexical processing in which episodic representations of new words are generated rapidly, but robust representations underlying lexical competition emerge only after a period of offline consolidation.