The temporal dynamics of ambiguity resolution: Evidence from spoken-word recognition

Abstract

Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with gradually lengthening fragments of spoken words, examined the availability of discriminating cues in the speech waveforms for these pairs. There was a clear frequency bias in participants' responses to short, ambiguous fragments, followed by a temporal window in which discriminating information gradually became available. A visual-world experiment examined speech contingent eye movements. Fixation analyses suggested that frequency influences lexical competition well beyond the point in the speech signal at which the spoken word has been fully discriminated from its competitor (as identified using gating). Taken together, these data support models in which the processing dynamics of lexical activation are a limiting factor on recognition speed, over and above the temporal unfolding of the speech signal.

On the Nature of Semantic Constraints on Lexical Access

“…This competition effect was particularly strong, and produced even more looks to the high-frequency competitor than to the low-frequency target object between 200 and 600 ms. Note that although Dahan and Gaskell (2007) tested the influence of lexical frequency on lexical activation in similar setup, they did not find any evidence of the high-frequency competitor outperforming the low-frequency target initially. A possible reason for this may be a smaller difference in lexical frequency between target and competitor than in the present study (Dahan and Gaskell: 1.7 for high-frequency objects and 0.8 for low-frequency objects).…”

“…Firstly, we wanted to investigate the effect of selective verb information on phonologically related words that differ in lexical frequency. Words that occur frequently in a language are recognized faster and more easily than words that occur rarely; this word frequency effect has repeatedly been demonstrated not only with different reaction time paradigms like auditory lexical decision (e.g., Connine et al 1990;Dupoux and Mehler 1990), rhyme monitoring (McQueen 1993), and priming (Marslen-Wilson 1990), but also with eye-tracking (Dahan et al 2001;Dahan and Gaskell 2007). With respect to eye movements, it has been shown that phonological competitor objects with high lexical frequency are fixated more than phonological competitor objects with low lexical frequency.…”

Adapting to suprasegmental lexical stress errors in foreign-accented speech

“…T2 thus allowed us to test longer lasting effects of processing stress information in the presence of segmentally disambiguating information. It is very common in eyetracking studies that effects last longer than the duration of segmental overlap (see, e.g., frequency effects in Dahan and Gaskell, 2007); effects need time to build up and also to disintegrate. Effects of group at T2 would suggest that listeners in the evidence group are better at recovering from the encounter of stress errors than the no-evidence group.…”

Language processing in reading and speech perception is fast and incremental: Implications for event-related potential research

“…Recent research in the "visual world" paradigm, in which a listener's eye movements to potential referents are measured while hearing speech, has indicated that words are recognized as denoting potential referents in the visual scene essentially as quickly as the auditory information arrives (Allopena, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998;Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995) and even that coarticulation and prosodic information is used early in the process of recognizing words (e.g., Dahan & Gaskell, 2007). The same paradigm suggests that comprehension, as reflected in eye movements, is sensitive very quickly to the syntactic possibilities afforded by the speech stream as constrained by the referential context (Spivey, Tanenhaus, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 2002) and even that listeners can anticipate upcoming referents (Altmann & Kamide, 1999).…”