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Auditory word comprehension is less incremental in isolated words

View ORCID ProfilePhoebe Gaston, View ORCID ProfileChristian Brodbeck, View ORCID ProfileColin Phillips, Ellen Lau
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.09.459631
Phoebe Gaston
1Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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  • For correspondence: phoebe.gaston@uconn.edu
Christian Brodbeck
2Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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Colin Phillips
1Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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Ellen Lau
1Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
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Abstract

Speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations for comprehension of words. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that incremental processing of speech input is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic process than is often assumed. We present evidence that neural effects of phoneme-by-phoneme lexical uncertainty, quantified by cohort entropy, occur in connected speech but not isolated words. In contrast, we find robust effects of phoneme probability, quantified by phoneme surprisal, during perception of both connected speech and isolated words. This dissociation rules out models of word recognition in which phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy are common indicators of a uniform process, even though these closely related information-theoretic measures both arise from the probability distribution of wordforms consistent with the input. We propose that phoneme surprisal effects reflect automatic access of a lower level of representation of the auditory input (e.g., wordforms) while cohort entropy effects are task-sensitive, driven by a competition process or a higher-level representation that is engaged late (or not at all) during the processing of single words.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Typo corrected in mTRF formula; Figure 4 legend formatting corrected; OSF hyperlinks corrected

  • https://osf.io/u56ea/

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 22, 2021.
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Auditory word comprehension is less incremental in isolated words
Phoebe Gaston, Christian Brodbeck, Colin Phillips, Ellen Lau
bioRxiv 2021.09.09.459631; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.09.459631
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Auditory word comprehension is less incremental in isolated words
Phoebe Gaston, Christian Brodbeck, Colin Phillips, Ellen Lau
bioRxiv 2021.09.09.459631; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.09.459631

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