Effects of Place of Articulation Changes on Auditory Neural Activity: A Magnetoencephalography Study

In casual speech, phonemic segments often assimilate such that they adopt features from adjacent segments, a typical feature being their place of articulation within the vocal tract (e.g., labial, coronal, velar). Place assimilation (e.g., from coronal /n/ to labial /m/: rainbow→*raimbow) alters the surface form of words. Listeners' ability to perceptually compensate for such changes seems to depend on the phonemic context, on whether the adjacent segment (e.g., the /b/ in “rainbow”) invites the particular change. Also, some assimilations occur frequently (e.g., /n/→/m/), others are rare (e.g., /m/→/n/). We investigated the effects of place assimilation, its contextual dependency, and its frequency on the strength of auditory evoked mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, using pseudowords. Results from magnetoencephalography (MEG) revealed that the MMN was modulated both by the frequency and contextual appropriateness of assimilations

Orthographic influences on agreement: A case for modality-specific form effects on grammatical encoding

We report two experiments that assessed the role of orthography in constraining subject-verb agreement in written (Experiment 1) and spoken (Experiment 2) French. We contrasted a condition in which the singular and plural forms of the subject head nouns were homophones but non-homographs (e.g., chanson, song-S, vs. chansons, songs-P) with a condition in which the subject head nouns were homophones and homographs in their singular and plural forms (e.g., refus, refusal-S,P). An effect of the orthographic marking was found in written production but not in oral production. The results, together with our previous findings, suggest modality-specific feedback effects during grammatical encoding: orthographic representations influence written production but morpho-phonological representations influence oral production

Predictors of picture naming speed

41st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic-Society, NEW ORLEANS, LA, 2000International audienceWe report the results of a large-scale picture naming experiment in which we evaluated the potential contribution of nine theoretically relevant factors to naming latencies. The experiment included a large number of items and a large sample of participants. In order to make this experiment as similar as possible to classic picture naming experiments, participants were familiarized with the materials during a training session. Speeded naming latencies were determined by a software key on the basis of the digital recording of the responses. The effects of various variables on these latencies were assessed with multiple regression techniques, using a repeated measures design. The interpretation of the observed effects is discussed in relation to previous studies and current views on lexical access during speech production

Lexical Alignment and Activation in Spoken Word Recognition

This paper examines the human mental lexicon and the associated word-recognition processes which together lie at the heart of our capacity to process spoken language as quickly and efficiently as we do. There is an emerging consensus that word recognition involves the activation of a set of lexical hypotheses and the selection of the target word from amongst this activated set. This view suggests itself quite naturally for speech given its continuous and sequential nature. More often than not listeners are in a position of having only partial sensory information about the target word — information that is insufficient to uniquely identify it. They are, nonetheless, continuously generating or activating lexical hypotheses on the basis of this partial information. Hence, it becomes an important research objective within this perspective to identify which words are activated during the recognition process — even if only temporarily or momentarily — and to determine how the appropriate word is ultimately selected and the inappropriate ones rejected

ASL-LEX: A lexical database of American Sign Language

ASL-LEX is a lexical database that catalogues information about nearly 1,000 signs in American Sign Language (ASL). It includes the following information: subjective frequency ratings from 25–31 deaf signers, iconicity ratings from 21–37 hearing non-signers, videoclip duration, sign length (onset and offset), grammatical class, and whether the sign is initialized, a fingerspelled loan sign or a compound. Information about English translations is available for a subset of signs (e.g., alternate translations, translation consistency). In addition, phonological properties (sign type, selected fingers, flexion, major and minor location, and movement) were coded and used to generate sub-lexical frequency and neighborhood density estimates. ASL-LEX is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students who are interested in the properties of the ASL lexicon. An interactive website where the database can be browsed and downloaded is available at http://asl-lex.org