A Picture May Be Worth 1,000 Words, but Is It a Letter? Examining Whether the Choice of Label Affects the Perception of Speech Sounds

Purpose: Researchers often use identification or goodness rating tasks assess speech perception for different populations. These tasks provide useinformation about a listener’s willingness to accept a range of acoustically variable stimuli as belonging to the same category and also about assessing stimuli that are labeled the same may not be perceived as equally good versions of a particular speech sound. Many methodological aspects of these simple tasks have been tested, but one aspect that has not is the choice of In this study, we examine response patterns to images versus letters, as stuwith different populations (children vs. adults) or different methods (typicbehavioral study vs. visual world paradigm) may vary in the type of label usMethod: Eighty-one adult listeners completed phoneme identification angoodness ratings tasks with either images of response options (a picture obear and a picture of a pear) or with letter labels (a capital B and P). Results: The results suggest that choice of label does not alter performawithin the tasks studied here. In addition, the results did show the expefinding that the slope of the response curve is steeper in an identification than in a goodness rating task. Conclusion: These results suggest that it is possible to compare across studthat use different response options, a benefit to research and practice becaletter labels can be used for nonimageable words and nonwords, whereimages may be best used for participants who are younger or have poorer reading skills.