Integration of semantic and coarticulation cues during spoken language comprehension in adults

Abstract

Recent work examining cue integration across levels of linguistic representation has found that listeners can dynamically integrate some of the lower-level and higher-level cues during spoken language comprehension. However, it is still not well understood how the mechanism of cue integration works. This study investigated how adults (n = 52) process preceding higher-level semantic cues and later low-level coarticulation cues during spoken language comprehension using an eye-tracking paradigm. Participants were tested on sentences that contained a prime (semantically related or semantically unrelated to the target) and a target which had varying coarticulation cues (matching versus mismatching splicing cues). Participants were presented with two pictures (target and competitor) on a screen. Analyses looked at the proportion of looking to the target during the prime and target time windows. Results demonstrate that adults flexibly use both the preceding semantic cues and later coarticulatory cues once they are available. Our findings also indicate that adults flexibly weighed both the preceding higher-level and later lower-level cues, such that the processing of low-level coarticulatory cue varied depending on the semantic context. We have added an unstudied level of cue (semantic context) to the set of cues that our cognitive system can integrate during language comprehension.