Abstract
This study assessed the effects of age, word frequency, and background noise on the time course of lexical activation during spoken word recognition. Participants (41 young adults and 39 older adults) performed a visual world word recognition task while we monitored their gaze position. On each trial, four phonologically unrelated pictures appeared on the screen. A target word was presented auditorily following a carrier phrase ("Click on the ________"), at which point participants were instructed to use the mouse to click on the picture that corresponded to the target word. High- and low-frequency words were presented in quiet to half of the participants. The other half heard the words in a low level of noise in which the words were still readily identifiable. Results showed that, even in the absence of phonological competitors in the visual array, high-frequency words were fixated more quickly than low-frequency words by both listener groups. Young adults were generally faster to fixate on targets compared to older adults, but the pattern of interactions among noise, word frequency, and listener age showed that older adults' lexical activation largely matches that of young adults in a modest amount of noise.
Highlights
Contemporary models of spoken word recognition generally agree on a lexical competition framework in which similar-sounding words compete with each other for recognition, so that recognition difficulty is related to the number of competitors a word has in the lexicon (Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980; Norris & McQueen, 2008)
Rather than focusing on competition between targets and displayed competitors, our current study focuses on how lexical frequency affects the time course of word recognition, even when there are no competitors in the visual display
We used logistic growth curve analysis (GCA) to model the by-participant target fixation data using the lme4 package in R version 3.6.2
Summary
Contemporary models of spoken word recognition generally agree on a lexical competition framework in which similar-sounding words (phonological neighbors) compete with each other for recognition, so that recognition difficulty is related to the number of competitors a word has in the lexicon (Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980; Norris & McQueen, 2008). Many studies infer the challenge caused by competitors by looking at identification errors, observing that words with many competitors are recognized less often in noise (e.g., (Goldinger et al, 1989; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Sommers & Danielson, 1999). While lexical activation may be partly automatic, selection and inhibition have been proposed to rely on additional cognitive resources (Sommers & Danielson, 1999). Lexical competition may underlie at least a portion of the cognitive challenge associated with effortful listening (Peelle, 2018; Pichora-Fuller et al, 2016)
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