Abstract
A combination of lexical bias and altered auditory feedback was used to investigate the influence of higher-order linguistic knowledge on the perceptual aspects of speech motor control. Subjects produced monosyllabic real words or pseudo-words containing the vowel [ε] (as in “head”) under conditions of altered auditory feedback involving a decrease in vowel first formant (F1) frequency. This manipulation had the effect of making the vowel sound more similar to [I] (as in “hid”), affecting the lexical status of produced words in two Lexical-Change (LC) groups (either changing them from real words to pseudo-words: e.g., less—liss, or pseudo-words to real words: e.g., kess—kiss). Two Non-Lexical-Change (NLC) control groups underwent the same auditory feedback manipulation during the production of [ε] real- or pseudo-words, only without any resulting change in lexical status (real words to real words: e.g., mess—miss, or pseudo-words to pseudo-words: e.g., ness—niss). The results from the LC groups indicate that auditory-feedback-based speech motor learning is sensitive to the lexical status of the stimuli being produced, in that speakers tend to keep their acoustic speech outcomes within the auditory-perceptual space corresponding to the task-related side of the word/non-word boundary (real words or pseudo-words). For the NLC groups, however, no such effect of lexical status is observed.
Highlights
Linguistic processing of the speech acoustic signal is a notoriously challenging phenomenon: speakers and listeners must selectively navigate ambiguous auditory scenes in real time and filter out irrelevant noise from the ambient environment (Zion Golumbic et al, 2012)
We predicted that the degree of compensation would vary when the auditory feedback manipulation had an effect on the lexical status of the word being produced
The present findings support this prediction: articulatory compensation to a decrease in F1 inducing a shift from real words to pseudo-words was found to be significantly less than when the same F1 perturbations provoked a reverse shift from pseudo-words to real words (LC-2)
Summary
Linguistic processing of the speech acoustic signal is a notoriously challenging phenomenon: speakers and listeners must selectively navigate ambiguous auditory scenes in real time and filter out irrelevant noise from the ambient environment (Zion Golumbic et al, 2012). It has long been demonstrated that linguistic context can determine how speech sounds or words are interpreted (Miller et al, 1951; Warren and Sherman, 1974; Ganong, 1980). Amongst the most illustrative examples of this is Ganong’s (1980) lexical effect on phoneme identification, whereby subjects are presented with a phonetically ambiguous consonant (e.g., between a [d] and a [t] as determined by voice onset time), occurring in a lexical context (e.g., “-ash”) such that one interpretation is consistent with a real-word (e.g., “dash”) and the other maps onto a pseudo-word (“tash”). Amongst the most illustrative examples of this is Ganong’s (1980) lexical effect on phoneme identification, whereby subjects are presented with a phonetically ambiguous consonant (e.g., between a [d] and a [t] as determined by voice onset time), occurring in a lexical context (e.g., “-ash”) such that one interpretation is consistent with a real-word (e.g., “dash”) and the other maps onto a pseudo-word (“tash”). Ganong’s (1980) study and later replications indicate that the identification of a target sound is biased toward real words (Figure 1), effectively shifting phonemic boundaries in favor of existing lexical entries (Connine and Clifton, 1987; Burton et al, 1989; Pitt, 1995)
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