Pupillary Measures of the Cognitive Effort in Auditory Novel Word Processing and Short-Term Retention.

Susana López-Ornat,Leire Martín,Raquel Camero,Alexandra Karousou,Carlos Gallego

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02248

Abstract

The use of the task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) methodology is emerging in the psycholinguistics literature, as a sensitive, reliable and dynamic psychophysiological measure of the cognitive effort produced by various aspects of language processing. This preliminary study aimed to assess the functionality and effectiveness of a TEPRs design for measuring the cognitive effort required for the processing and spontaneous (non-explicitly prompted) short-term retention of novel phonological forms presented auditorily. Twenty-four young adult participants (aged 19–28 years, M = 20.3, SD = 2.13) were auditorily presented with a series of pseudowords differing in their number of syllables and their syllabic complexity. Then, they were asked to produce a response to a delayed pseudoword–color matching task aimed to induce the short-term retention of the novel forms. Results on the size and timing of the TEPRs reveal a significant pupillary activation, starting immediately after the presentation of the auditory stimuli, peaking at 1080 ms and not subsiding significantly during the protracted retention period. Moreover, the differential complexity of the novel words phonology significantly affected pupillary activation. Overall, these preliminary results point to the effectiveness of pupillometry as a technique for capturing the cognitive effort entailed in the short-term maintenance of novel word forms in the phonological loop, a process deemed crucial in the everyday novel word learning process. Results are discussed in view of future research that could establish and extend their implications.

Highlights

Task evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) have been established as a sensitive and reliable psychophysiological measure of the cognitive effort entailed in a variety of tasks (Papesh and Goldinger, 2015)
The use of the TEPRs is emerging in the psycholinguistics research (Schmidtke, 2017; Zekveld et al, 2018)
A full-scale study is planned to include more trials per condition. This will permit more in-depth analyses on the effect of the PWs phonological complexity on the effort required for their retention. These results point to the effectiveness of pupillometry in capturing the cognitive effort entailed in the processing and short-term retention of auditorily presented novel words

Summary

Introduction

Task evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) have been established as a sensitive and reliable psychophysiological measure of the cognitive effort entailed in a variety of tasks (Papesh and Goldinger, 2015). Subside rapidly after termination of processing (Partala and Surakka, 2003). They are sensitive to between-task, within-task and between-individual variations in cognitive effort (Beatty, 1982). Relevant studies focus on speech listening effort in noisy contexts and degraded speech (e.g., Piquado et al, 2010; Koelewijn et al, 2012; Zekveld et al, 2013, 2014; Causse et al, 2016; McMahon et al, 2016; Wendt et al, 2017), on resolving ambiguous syntactic categories (Vogelzang et al, 2016), on semantic, syntactic, metric, or rhyme violations (Scheepers et al, 2012) or on the processing of difficult versus easy nouns (Chapman and Hallowell, 2015). There is no TEPRs research on the cognitive effort required for the processing and short-term retention of auditory (pseudo)words

Results

Discussion

Conclusion