Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension

Abstract

, who originated the cross-modal priming task and thus signiWcantly furthered the study of spoken-language processing, died in April 2006. This paper is dedicated to his memory. AbstractWe propose that speech comprehension involves the activation of token representations of the phonological forms of current lexical hypotheses, separately from the ongoing construction of a conceptual interpretation of the current utterance. In a series of cross-modal priming experiments, facilitation of lexical decision responses to visual target words (e.g., time) was found for targets that were semantic associates of auditory prime words (e.g., date) when the primes were isolated words, but not when the same primes appeared in sentence contexts. Identity priming (e.g., faster lexical decisions to visual date after spoken date than after an unrelated prime) appeared, however, both with isolated primes and with primes in prosodically neutral sentences. Associative priming in sentence contexts only emerged when sentence prosody involved contrastive accents, or when sentences were terminated immediately after the prime. Associative priming is therefore not an automatic consequence of speech processing. In no experiment was there associative priming from embedded words (e.g., sedate-time), but there was inhibitory identity priming (e.g., sedate-date) from embedded primes in sentence contexts. Speech comprehension therefore appears to involve separate distinct activation both of token phonological word representations and of conceptual word representations. Furthermore, both of these types of representation are distinct from the long-term memory representations of word form and meaning.

Exploring the Role of Lexical stress in Lexical Recognition

“…On the other hand, other recent findings cast doubt on the comparability of at least the earlier associativepriming result with the more recent fragment-priming data; associative priming can be absent even with materials that provide robust identity priming (Norris, Cutler, McQueen, & Butterfield, 2003). Because the materials used by Cooper et al were the only kind that it is possible to use in this kind of experiment in English, the issue cannot be tested directly in that language.…”

“…A recent study of lexical activation by Norris et al (2003) reported nine cross-modal priming experiments comparing facilitatory effects from identical versus associatively related primes. On the basis of the variable patterning that they observed in associative priming effects, Norris et al argued that the phonological representations activated by speech input, and potentially tapped in identity priming experiments, are distinct from the conceptual representations activated in the course of utterance interpretation.…”

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

“…Admittedly, even when knowing the meaning of the prime and the visual target, less proficient learners might have had difficulties with the interpretation of the L2 sentences preventing the observation of reliable associative priming effects. In fact, associative priming effects depend on the comprehension and interpretation of the experimental sentence (Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Braun & Tagliapietra, 2009;Norris, Cutler, McQueen, & Butterfield, 2006;Tabossi, 1988;Williams, 1988). Assessing proficiency on the basis of the recognition of the filler trials tests the recognition of a large number of words and nonwords and provides an independent estimate of the non-native lexicon and L2 understanding.…”

Models of spoken‐word recognition

“…A typical empirical approach to this question is to compare form priming with semantic priming. 85 Based on these studies, it has been argued that phonological forms are separate from conceptual representations, and that during word recognition phonological representations are activated first, but that activation cascades through to conceptual representations as soon as possible (but see e.g., Ref 95).…”

“…52,84 Additionally, evidence from priming studies supports the assumption that phonological and conceptual representations are possibly separate and to a certain extent independent components of word recognition. 85 …”