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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 14, 2025

Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception
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Talker-specific predictions during language processing.

Rachel Ryskin1,2, Shukhan Ng3, Katherine Mimnaugh4

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
|March 11, 2021
PubMed
Summary

Listeners adjust their understanding of word meanings based on who is speaking. Even typical words can seem unexpected if associated with a specific talker, influencing language comprehension.

Keywords:
ComprehensionERPcategory typicalitypredictionsemantics

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • World knowledge influences language comprehension, affecting how typical and atypical exemplars are processed.
  • Event-related potentials, specifically the N400 and post-N400 frontal positivity, are used to measure semantic processing and integration of unexpected information.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether listeners adapt their category knowledge to specific talkers.
  • To examine if talker-specific associations influence the processing of typical and atypical exemplars.

Main Methods:

  • Replication of typicality effects in the auditory modality.
  • Experiment involving a two-talker context where talkers alternated cueing and answering.
  • Participants heard pre-recorded interviews establishing talker-specific associations with atypical exemplars.

Main Results:

  • Typicality effects were replicated in the auditory modality.
  • Listeners showed increased frontal positivity to a typical exemplar when spoken by a talker with atypical associations, compared to another talker.
  • This suggests listeners perceived the typical exemplar as atypical for that specific talker.

Conclusions:

  • Listeners can tailor their expectations about word meanings to individual talkers.
  • Talker-specific world knowledge plays a role in real-time language comprehension and expectation formation.