Activation of words with phonological overlap

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Speech Perception

Background:

• Listeners' mental lexicons activate words similar to speech input (cohort neighbors).
• It remains debated whether cohort neighbors are fully excluded after input mismatch.
• Understanding lexical access dynamics is crucial for speech processing models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing of cohort neighbors during speech perception.
• To determine if cohort neighbors are completely excluded or continue processing after mismatch.
• To examine the temporal dynamics of lexical access using behavioral and neural measures.

Main Methods:

• Auditory-visual word onset priming lexical decision task.
• Recording of behavioral data and event-related brain potentials (ERPs).
• Using German words, primes were either direct targets or cohort neighbors.

Main Results:

• Lexical decision responses were delayed for cohort neighbors compared to controls.
• Left-anterior ERPs showed sustained facilitated processing for cohort neighbors.
• Behavioral delays suggest cohort neighbors are disfavored at the decision stage.

Conclusions:

• Cohort neighbors undergo extended parallel processing.
• The brain tracks less efficient word candidates alongside dominant ones.
• This suggests a more complex and persistent activation of lexical representations than previously assumed.