The role of morphology in phoneme prediction: Evidence from MEG

Non-linear processing of a linear speech stream: The influence of morphological structure on the recognition of spoken Arabic words

“…This finding closely converges with previous studies (Ettinger et al, 2014;Gagnepain et al, 2012), which also found phoneme surprisal to correlate with activity in these regions at a similar time.…”

“…In accordance to previous studies (Ettinger et al, 2014;Gagnepain et al, 2012;Mesgarani et al, 2014) we expect to observe the neurophysiological effects of phoneme predictability in the STG and TTG, which will serve as our two regions of interest (ROIs) for the analysis. As the STG has been associated both with phoneme feature integration and segmental prediction at different points along the time-course of word recognition, we analyse two time-windows of interest associated with each stage of processing.…”

“…The inverse solution was applied to each trial at every source, for each millisecond defined in the epoch, employing a fixed orientation of the dipole current that estimates the source normal to the cortical surface and retains dipole orientation. We defined our two ROIs (STG & TTG) based on previous studies (Ettinger et al, 2014;Gagnepain et al, 2012). The STG consisted of 83 vertices, and the TTG consisted of 24 vertices (see Fig.…”

“…Prior literature motivated two time-windows of interest: 100-200 ms to evaluate phonetic feature analysis (Mesgarani et al, 2009); and 150-350 ms, which has been implicated in phoneme prediction in two previous studies (Ettinger et al, 2014;Gagnepain et al, 2012). The cluster permutation test followed the same procedure as described in Solomyak and Marantz (2009: 193, see Section 2.4).…”

“…In order to investigate whether morphological structure enhances phoneme prediction, and therefore the effects of prediction error, Ettinger, Linzen, and Marantz (2014) crossed morphological complexity with probability of word-final syllable during spoken word recognition, using MEG to measure responses at word offset to bi-morphemic and mono-morphemic disyllabic words (i. e., swiftness vs. compost) where each set of words included more probable and less probable second syllables. Activity localised to the STG and transverse temporal gyrus (TTG) displayed a main effect of second-syllable surprisal, and an interaction between surprisal and morphological complexity, whereby morphologically complex words showed an enhanced ''surprisal" effect (where surprisal as a variable is a particular function of conditional probability rather than a psychological effect of ''surprise" in the layman's sense).…”