Pupillary Measures of the Cognitive Effort in Auditory Novel Word Processing and Short-Term Retention

Abstract

The use of the task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) methodology is emerging in the psycholinguistics literature, as a sensitive, reliable and dynamic psychophysiological measure of the cognitive effort produced by various aspects of language processing. This preliminary study aimed to assess the functionality and effectiveness of a TEPRs design for measuring the cognitive effort required for the processing and spontaneous (non-explicitly prompted) short-term retention of novel phonological forms presented auditorily. Twenty-four young adult participants (aged 19–28 years, M = 20.3, SD = 2.13) were auditorily presented with a series of pseudowords differing in their number of syllables and their syllabic complexity. Then, they were asked to produce a response to a delayed pseudoword–color matching task aimed to induce the short-term retention of the novel forms. Results on the size and timing of the TEPRs reveal a significant pupillary activation, starting immediately after the presentation of the auditory stimuli, peaking at 1080 ms and not subsiding significantly during the protracted retention period. Moreover, the differential complexity of the novel words phonology significantly affected pupillary activation. Overall, these preliminary results point to the effectiveness of pupillometry as a technique for capturing the cognitive effort entailed in the short-term maintenance of novel word forms in the phonological loop, a process deemed crucial in the everyday novel word learning process. Results are discussed in view of future research that could establish and extend their implications.

Autonomic Nervous System Correlates of Speech Categorization Revealed Through Pupillometry

“…From the perspective of listening effort, pupillometry is an ideal avenue for investigating the physiological nature and individual differences in speech categorization. Germane to our interests in speech processing, aspects of the pupil response systematically vary with processing load when interpreting languages (Hyönä et al, 1995), speech intelligibility (Zekveld et al, 2010), divided attention during speech listening (Koelewijn et al, 2014), semantic ambiguity (Vogelzang et al, 2016), visual-auditory semantic incongruency (Renner and Wlodarczak, 2017), and pseudoword complexity (López-Ornat et al, 2018). Relevant to this study, researchers have used pupillometry and eyetracking methods to examine how acoustically degraded speech influences listening effort (e.g., Bidelman et al, 2019a;Winn et al, 2015).…”

Disentangling listening effort and memory load beyond behavioural evidence: Pupillary response to listening effort during a concurrent memory task

“…For instance, within one speech perception task, pupil 517 diameter gradually decreased with increasing trial numbers, due to task/stimuli 518 habituation [17,[38][39][40]. However, when listeners needed to remember the digits or 519 pseudo-words presented auditorily, pupil diameter increased progressively, until the 520 memory span was exceeded [16,24,26,71]. Note that in the current experiment, listeners 521 needed to continuously decode words embedded in noise, which was more effortful than 522 listening to digits or pseudo-words in quiet.…”

Gaze Following and Pupil Dilation as Early Diagnostic Markers of Autism in Toddlers

“…With regard to the analysis of pupil dilation data, a model used by López-Ornat et al [ 30 ] was followed, thus establishing four periods of measurement. In the first period, during the 400 ms that preceded the start of the trial, the baseline (BL) of pupil dilation of each participant was set, this being a measurement of pupil diameter.…”

“…So far, these measures have not been studied in a linguistic interaction task with toddlers. In a study with adults [ 30 ], it was found that when neurotypical subjects hear a new word, their pupil dilates significantly compared to the baseline. Therefore, children with typical development, interested in learning language and with a balanced arousal level, are expected to show greater pupillary dilation after listening to a pseudoword compared to children with ASD.…”

“…It has been argued that pupilar dilations in response to cognitive tasks depend on attentional control and they seem to be independent of those produced by emotional arousal [ 31 , 32 ]. It has been assumed that this also happens also when processing the word [ 30 ].…”