Neuroperceptual Differences in Consonant and Vowel Discrimination: As Revealed by Direct Cortical Electrical Interference

Boatman, Dana; Hall, Charles B.; Goldstein, Moïse H.; Lesser, R.P.; Gordon, Barry

doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(97)80006-8

Cited by 64 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Thus, transposed-letter vowel pseudowords are also fairly sim- ilar to their base words, but they are simply less similar than transposed-letter consonant pseudowords. These results are consistent with claims that there may be some basic processing differences between vowels and consonants in the process of lexical access, and with findings from other paradigms (visual-word perception: [1,18]; speech perception: [2]; neuropsychology: [4,9]). …”

supporting

confidence: 91%

ERP correlates of transposed-letter similarity effects: Are consonants processed differently from vowels?

Carreiras

Vergara

Perea

2007

Neuroscience Letters

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Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing letters are very effective for activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). Furthermore, pseudoword transpositions of consonants are more similar to their corresponding base words than the transposition of vowels. We report one experiment using pseudowords created by the transposition of two consonants, two vowels, and their corresponding control conditions (i.e., the replacement of two consonants or two vowels) in a lexical decision task while Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude of the N400 component as a function of the type of pseudoword (transposed-letter versus replacement letter pseudowords), and this modulation was different for transposed consonants and vowels. These results suggest that consonants and vowels play a different role during word processing. © 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Visual-word recognition; Transposed-letters; ERPs; Consonants and vowels When we read it is common to misread words like causal and casual. A growing number of studies have shown that, during the recognition of any given word, not only is the representation of the word itself activated, but also the representations of similarly spelled words ("neighbors"). Although the majority of "neighborhood" experiments have focused on one specific type of neighbor: one-letter different neighbors (e.g., trail and train), recent research has shown that transposed-letter neighbors may be even more perceptually similar to the target stimulus than oneletter different neighbors (trail and trial; [28,31]). Most notably, the presence of transposed-letter effects has critical implications for the choice of an input coding-scheme in visual-word recognition. Most current computational models of visual-word recognition [7,13,20] assume that each letter is encoded in a different "letter-channel", and hence they cannot accommodate the presence of transposed-letter effects.To overcome the limitations of a channel-specific codingscheme, a number of input coding-schemes have been proposed (SERIOL model [34] [14]; overlap model [12]). Although the basic mechanisms of how letter position is encoded differ across these models, they all predict that transposed-letter neighbors like casual and causal are perceptually very similar. There is one caveat, however: for simplicity's sake, these models assume that consonants and vowels are processed in the same way. As shown in the present paper, this assumption may be an oversimplification. Recent transposed-letter experiments [28,27] have shown that consonants and vowels play a different role in visual-word recognition. In particular, Perea and Lupker [28] obtained masked priming effects for consonant transpositions (relovución-REVOLUCIÓN versus retosución-REVOLUCIÓN), but not for vowel transpositions (reluvoción-REVOLUCIÓN versus relavición-REVOLUCIÓN). Furthermore, these findings have been extended...

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supporting

confidence: 91%

ERP correlates of transposed-letter similarity effects: Are consonants processed differently from vowels?

Carreiras

Vergara

Perea

2007

Neuroscience Letters

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“…Evidence from studies of dichotic listening, speech perception, direct cortical electrical interference, and clinical studies on patients with left hemisphere lesions suggest that the two broad classes of phonemes, vowels and consonants, have different neural representations in the speech perception system (Boatman, Hall, Goldstein, Lesser, & Gordon, 1997;Boatman, Lesser, Hall, & Gordon, 1994;Caramazza, Chialant, Capasso, & Miceli, 2000;Shankweiler & Studdert-Kennedy, 1966;van Ooijen, 1996). However, in the current study, no difference in the spatial extent of activations associated with vowel and consonant WR was observed.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 69%

Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus

Sharp¹,

Scott²,

Cutler³

et al. 2005

Brain and Language

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Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a process-specific organization, with activation dependent on processing demands, such as the amount of selection needed to decide between competing lexical alternatives. In a novel word retrieval task, word reconstruction (WR), subjects generated real words from heard non-words by the substitution of either a vowel or consonant. Both types of lexical retrieval, informed by sound structure alone, produced activation within anterior and posterior left IFG regions. Within these regions there was greater activity for consonant WR, which is more difficult and imposes greater processing demands. These results support a process-specific organization of the anterior left IFG.

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“…Cole, Yan, Mak, Fanty and Bailey (1996) carried out experiments with English speech where either consonants or vowels had been rendered incomprehensible and found that vowels are clearly more important for recognition than obstruent consonants. Boatman, Hall, Goldstein, Lesser and Gordon's (1997) experiments with implanted subdural electrodes showed that electrical interference at different brain sites could impair either consonant discrimination or vowel and tone discrimination. A study of two Italian-speaking aphasics with selective impaired processing of vowels and consonants, respectively, suggests that vowels and consonants are processed by different neural mechanisms (Caramazza, Chialant, Capazzo & Miceli, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring systematicity between phonological and context-cooccurrence representations of the mental lexicon

Tamariz¹

2008

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This paper investigates the existence of systematicity between two similarity-based representations of the lexicon, one focusing on word-form and another one based on cooccurrence statistics in speech, which captures aspects of syntax and semantics. An analysis of the three most frequent form-homogeneous word groups in a Spanish speech corpus (cvcv, cvccv and cvcvcv words) supports the existence of systematicity: words that sound similar tend to occur in the same lexical contexts in speech. A lexicon that is highly systematic in this respect, however, may lead to confusion between similar-sounding words that appear in similar contexts. Exploring the impact of different phonological features on systematicity reveals that while some features (such as sharing consonants or the stress pattern) seem to underlie the measured systematicity, others (particularly, sharing the stressed vowel) oppose it, perhaps to help discriminate between words that systematicity may render ambiguous.

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Neuroperceptual Differences in Consonant and Vowel Discrimination: As Revealed by Direct Cortical Electrical Interference

Cited by 64 publications

References 38 publications

ERP correlates of transposed-letter similarity effects: Are consonants processed differently from vowels?

ERP correlates of transposed-letter similarity effects: Are consonants processed differently from vowels?

Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus

Exploring systematicity between phonological and context-cooccurrence representations of the mental lexicon

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