Phonological Neighborhood Research Articles

Evidence of community structure in phonological networks of multiple languages.

Thousands of phonological word forms known to a speaker can be organised as a lexical network using the tools of network science. In these networks, nodes represent words and edges are placed between phonological neighbours. Previous work has shown that phonological networks of various languages have similar macrolevel network properties. The present study aimed to investigate if phonological networks of different languages also have similar mesolevel properties, specifically, the presence of robust community structure. Prior community detection analyses revealed robust community structure for English. Community detection analyses conducted on French, German, Dutch, and Spanish networks indicate that all networks showed strong evidence of community structure-mesolevel clustering of word forms whereby larger communities tended to contain shorter, frequent words with many phonological neighbours. Words of the same community tended to share similar phonotactic structures. Results suggest that the organisation of phonological word forms in language are governed by similar principles that could have important implications for lexical processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Modelling the bilingual lexicon as a multiplex phonological network.

Phonological word form networks of the mental lexicon are of psycholinguistic relevance, offering insights into the efficiency of lexical access. While much research has concentrated on first languages, there is growing evidence suggesting that phonological networks of second languages are equally significant for lexical processes. Bilingual language processing is proposed to involve the integration of first and second languages, with lexical activation spreading between similar word forms in both languages. Multiplex networks provide a framework to combine different phonological networks, allowing for the analysis of the integrated lexical system's behaviour during lexical processing. In the context of the present study, which focusses on German learners of English as a second language, a multiplex network analysis was constructed to model the interactive complexity of the bilingual mental lexicon. The study tested cross-linguistic effects in a word recognition task using English stimuli. Results revealed that during lexical processing in their second language English, German speakers also activate phonological neighbours from German. In addition, the bilinguals are attuned to the interconnectedness (i.e., clustering) of the German and English neighbours with one another in the phonological neighbourhood of the English target words. These findings can contribute to the ongoing debate on the degree of integration in the bilingual mental lexicon and shed light on the role that phonological networks can play in modelling bilingual lexical processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic memory navigation in HIV: Conceptual associations and word selection patterns

Objective: This proof-of-concept study aimed to characterize semantic memory profiles in individuals with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and mild neurocognitive impairment. Method: Using a semantic relatedness task, we explored conceptual association and word selection patterns in people living with HIV (PLWH; n = 50) relative to people living without HIV (n = 46). We also studied whether word selection patterns in the PLWH group were associated with working memory capacity, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. Results: While accuracy did not differ between groups, PLWH produced significantly longer responses than controls (r = .32), with fewer hypernyms (d = .47), more troponyms (r = .37), and words that were more frequent (r = .39) and had more phonological neighbors (r = .22). These patterns survived covariation with participants’ cognitive status. None of these patterns correlated with measures of working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control or viral load (all correlation coefficients < .36). Conclusions: Together, these results suggest that PLWH might use alternative word finding strategies during semantic memory navigation, irrespective of the severity of other cognitive symptoms. Such findings contribute to the characterization of cognitive deficits in HIV and to the search for novel markers of the condition.

Are Late Talkers Just Late? Neighborhood Density and Word Frequency Properties of Late Talkers' Spoken Vocabularies.

Typically developing toddlers extract patterns from their input to add words to their spoken lexicons, yet some evidence suggests that late talkers leverage the statistical regularities of the ambient language differently than do peers. Using the extended statistical learning account, we sought to compare lexical-level statistical features of spoken vocabularies between late talkers and two typically developing comparison groups. MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories American English Words and Sentences (N = 1,636) were extracted from Wordbank, a database of CDIs. Inventories were divided into three groups: (a) a late talker group (n = 202); (b) a typically developing age-matched group (n = 1,238); and (c) a younger, typically developing group (n = 196) matched to the late talkers on expressive language. Neighborhood density and word frequency were calculated for each word produced by each participant and standardized to z scores. Mixed-effects models were used to evaluate group differences. The late talker and younger, language-matched groups' spoken vocabularies consist, on standardized average, of words from denser phonological neighborhoods and words higher in frequency of occurrence in parent-child speech, compared to older, typically developing toddlers. These findings provide support for the extended statistical learning account. Late talkers appear to generally be extracting and using similar patterns from their language input as do younger toddlers with similar levels of expressive vocabulary. This suggests that late talkers may be following a delayed, not deviant, trajectory of expressive language growth.

Bark is Learned Before Bark: Iconic Meanings of Homographs are Learned Earlier

Iconicity refers to words whose forms imitate their meanings (e.g., onomatopoeia). Research shows that children learn iconic words earlier than arbitrary words, suggesting iconicity may facilitate word-learning. However, Laing (2019) proposed that children may learn these words earlier because their forms are easier to produce. We explored this by testing the age at which specific meanings within a given form (e.g., two meanings of “bark”) are learned. 120 participants provided iconicity ratings on 1668 specific word-meaning pairings for 390 homographs on a scale of not iconic at all (1) to very iconic (7). These ratings were then used to predict age-of-acquisition for each specific meaning. A linear mixed effects regression, which accounted for word form, and controlled for length, frequency, and phonological neighbourhood size, found that iconic word-meanings were learned earlier than less iconic ones. This finding supports iconicity as an important factor in word-learning.

Phonetic categorization in phonological lexical neighborhoods: Facilitatory and inhibitory effects

Phonetic processing, whereby the bottom-up speech signal is translated into higher-level phonological representations such as phonemes, has been demonstrated to be influenced by phonological lexical neighborhoods. Previous studies show facilitatory effects of lexicality and phonological neighborhood density on phonetic categorization. However, given the evidence for lexical competition in spoken word recognition, we hypothesize that there are concurrent facilitatory and inhibitory effects of phonological lexical neighborhoods on phonetic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants categorized the onset phoneme in word-nonword and nonword-word acoustic continua. The results show that the target word of the continuum exhibits facilitatory lexical influences whereas rhyme neighbors inhibit phonetic categorization. The results support the hypothesis that sublexical phonetic processing is affected by multiple facilitatory and inhibitory lexical forces in the processing stream.

Phonological neighbourhood effects in Italian speech production: Evidence from healthy and neurologically impaired populations

ABSTRACT In two speech production studies conducted in Italian, we investigated the impact of phonological neighbourhood properties such as the neighbourhood density and the mean frequency of the neighbours on speech processing. Two populations of healthy (Study 1) and neurologically impaired (Study 2) individuals were tested. We employed multi-regression methods to analyse naming latencies in Study 1 and accuracy rates in Study 2 while controlling for various psycholinguistic predictors. In Study 1, pictures with words from high-density neighbourhoods were named faster than those from low-density neighbourhoods. Additionally, words with high-frequency neighbours were named faster in Study 1 and yielded higher accuracy rates in Study 2. The results suggest facilitatory effects of both the phonological neighbourhood density and frequency neighbourhood variables. Furthermore, we observed interactions between these two phonological neighbourhood variables and name agreement and repetition. Specifically, the facilitation effect was more pronounced for pictures with lower name agreement and during the initial presentation of the pictures. These findings are discussed in the context of previous literature and within the framework of interactive models of speech production.

Phonological neighbors cooperate during spoken-sentence processing: Evidence from a nonword detection task.

We used a novel nonword detection task to examine the lexical competition principle postulated in most models of spoken word recognition. To do so, in Experiment 1 we presented sequences of spoken words with half of the sequences containing a nonword, and the target nonword (i.e., press a response key whenever you detect a nonword in the sequence) could either be phonologically related (a phonological neighbor) or unrelated to the immediately preceding word. We reasoned that the reactivation of a phonological neighbor during target nonword processing should delay the moment at which a nonword decision can be made. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants were faster at detecting nonwords when they were preceded by a phonological neighbor compared with an unrelated word. In Experiment 2, an inhibitory effect of phonological relatedness on nonword decisions was observed in a classic priming situation using the same set of related and unrelated word-nonword pairs. We discuss the implications of these findings in regard to the main models of spoken word recognition, and conclude that our specific experimental set-up with phonological neighbors embedded in spoken sentences is more sensitive to cooperative interactions between co-activated sublexical representations than lexical competition between co-activated lexical representations, with the latter being modulated by whether or not the words compete for the same slot in time.

Measuring the roles of variation and phonological density into the development of branching CCV onsets in Brazilian Portuguese

This study focuses on the acquisition of CCV syllables (Consonant1+Consonant2+Vowel) in Brazilian Portuguese. Our aim is to cast light on the roles of linguistic variation and phonological density into the phonotactic development. We used adult and child directed speech corpora to quantify the optional process of CCV&amp;rarr;CV reduction in unstressed contexts in the input, as well as the frequency, segmental pattern, and phonological density of CCV syllables. Based in their distributional properties, we argue that CCV acquisition in BP goes through a moment of incorrect structural and segmental contrast neutralization, modelled by the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2006). The neutralization is caused by an overgeneralization of CCV variation, combined with CCV-CV low density; and an overgeneralization of the C/ɾ/V frequent segmental pattern, combined with the low density of C/ɾ/V-C/l/V but high density and equal frequency of /ɾ/V-/l/V.Data from a mispronunciation detection task confirms that the phonological density influences the development: children who do not articulate CCV syllables detect more CCV&amp;rarr;CV stimuli when there are phonological neighbors (/pɾato/&amp;rarr;[ˈpa.tʊ], but not /pɾeto/&amp;rarr;*[ˈpe.tʊ]) and high phonological density ([l]V&amp;harr;[ɾ]V are detected, but not C[l]V&amp;harr;C[ɾ]V, with the lowest rates of detection in the C/l/V&amp;rarr;C[ɾ]V direction).

Automated free speech analysis reveals distinct markers of Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia

Dementia can disrupt how people experience and describe events as well as their own role in them. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) compromises the processing of entities expressed by nouns, while behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) entails a depersonalized perspective with increased third-person references. Yet, no study has examined whether these patterns can be captured in connected speech via natural language processing tools. To tackle such gaps, we asked 96 participants (32 AD patients, 32 bvFTD patients, 32 healthy controls) to narrate a typical day of their lives and calculated the proportion of nouns, verbs, and first- or third-person markers (via part-of-speech and morphological tagging). We also extracted objective properties (frequency, phonological neighborhood, length, semantic variability) from each content word. In our main study (with 21 AD patients, 21 bvFTD patients, and 21 healthy controls), we used inferential statistics and machine learning for group-level and subject-level discrimination. The above linguistic features were correlated with patients’ scores in tests of general cognitive status and executive functions. We found that, compared with HCs, (i) AD (but not bvFTD) patients produced significantly fewer nouns, (ii) bvFTD (but not AD) patients used significantly more third-person markers, and (iii) both patient groups produced more frequent words. Machine learning analyses showed that these features identified individuals with AD and bvFTD (AUC = 0.71). A generalizability test, with a model trained on the entire main study sample and tested on hold-out samples (11 AD patients, 11 bvFTD patients, 11 healthy controls), showed even better performance, with AUCs of 0.76 and 0.83 for AD and bvFTD, respectively. No linguistic feature was significantly correlated with cognitive test scores in either patient group. These results suggest that specific cognitive traits of each disorder can be captured automatically in connected speech, favoring interpretability for enhanced syndrome characterization, diagnosis, and monitoring.

KannadaLex: A lexical database with psycholinguistic information

Databases containing lexical properties are of primary importance to psycholinguistic research and speech-language therapy. Several lexical databases for different languages have been developed in the recent past, but Kannada, a language spoken by 50.8 million people, has no comprehensive lexical database yet. To address this, KannadaLex , a Kannada lexical database is built as a language resource that contains orthographic, phonological, and syllabic information about words that are sourced from newspaper articles from the last decade. Along with these vital statistics like the phonological neighbourhood, syllable complexity summed syllable and bigram syllable frequencies, and lemma and inflectional family information are stored. The database is validated by correlating frequency, a well-established psycholinguistic feature, with other numerical features. The developed lexical database contains 170K words from varied disciplines, complete with psycholinguistic features. This KannadaLex is a comprehensive resource for psycholinguists, speech therapists, and linguistic researchers for analyzing Kannada and other similar languages. Psycholinguists require lexical data for choosing stimuli to conduct experiments that study the factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Speech and language therapists query these databases for developing the most efficient stimuli for evaluating, diagnosing, and treating communication disorders, and rehabilitation of speech after brain injuries.

Neural representation of phonological wordform in temporal cortex.

While the neural bases of the earliest stages of speech categorization have been widely explored using neural decoding methods, there is still a lack of consensus on questions as basic as how wordforms are represented and in what way this word-level representation influences downstream processing in the brain. Isolating and localizing the neural representations of wordform is challenging because spoken words activate a variety of representations (e.g., segmental, semantic, articulatory) in addition to form-based representations. We addressed these challenges through a novel integrated neural decoding and effective connectivity design using region of interest (ROI)-based, source-reconstructed magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) data collected during a lexical decision task. To identify wordform representations, we trained classifiers on words and nonwords from different phonological neighborhoods and then tested the classifiers' ability to discriminate between untrained target words that overlapped phonologically with the trained items. Training with word neighbors supported significantly better decoding than training with nonword neighbors in the period immediately following target presentation. Decoding regions included mostly right hemisphere regions in the posterior temporal lobe implicated in phonetic and lexical representation. Additionally, neighbors that aligned with target word beginnings (critical for word recognition) supported decoding, but equivalent phonological overlap with word codas did not, suggesting lexical mediation. Effective connectivity analyses showed a rich pattern of interaction between ROIs that support decoding based on training with lexical neighbors, especially driven by right posterior middle temporal gyrus. Collectively, these results evidence functional representation of wordforms in temporal lobes isolated from phonemic or semantic representations.

Graded phonological neighborhood effects on lexical retrieval: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

How phonological neighborhood affects lexical retrieval can shed important light on lexical organization and processing. Yet these effects are unclear, particularly in Mandarin Chinese. This is likely because the working definition of phonological neighbors (i.e., the one-phoneme edit rule) used in Indo-European languages inadequately characterizes the phonological similarity among Mandarin words, which have simpler syllable structures and lexical tones. The current study proposes a graded Mandarin phonological neighborhood and investigates the impacts of near-to-distant Mandarin phonological neighbors on lexical retrieval. In Study 1, we investigated how Mandarin phonological similarity is influenced by the editing of lexical tone, constituent (onset/rime, initial/final) and phoneme. Native Mandarin speakers rated the similarity between the edited monosyllabic words. We found that constituent-edit neighbors were rated as the most dissimilar, followed by phoneme-edit neighbors, while tone-edit neighbors were the most similar. In Study 2, we calculated the constituent-, phoneme- and tone-edit phonological neighborhood densities and frequencies for 4,706 monosyllabic Mandarin words. We then utilized extant datasets to examine how the density and frequency of neighbors at varied distances, as well as of homophonic neighbors, impact response latencies in word naming, visual lexical decision, and picture naming tasks. The results showed that graded phonological neighbors had differential impacts on lexical retrieval efficiency: distant (constituent-edit) neighbors facilitated word retrieval, while near (phoneme-, tone-edit and homophonic) neighbors had inhibitory effects. We discuss these findings within an interactive activation and competition framework and suggest future directions to study the representation and processing of the Mandarin phonological lexicon.

Exploring auditory recognition: Native Japanese listeners' perception of frequent and infrequent English words in noise with varied phonological neighborhood densities

Native Japanese listeners identified English words embedded in noise (SNR + 6dB) produced by native American English and Japanese speakers. The identical word list used in our previous study (Nozawa and Wayland 2023) was employed. Listeners responded by typing the words they heard. The findings revealed no discernible impacts of phonological neighborhood density, possibly due to the small vocabulary size limiting competition from other words. However, frequent words exhibited greater precision in recognition compared to infrequent words. Despite the introduction of noise, the overall accuracy of responses did not experience a substantial impact. Nevertheless, specific words like “class” and “club,” initially nearly perfect in accuracy without noise, dropped to 0% accuracy. Most errors included phoneme substitution rather than phoneme addition or deletion, and in / CVC/ words, the onset consonant was identified substantially better than the vowel and the coda consonant. Initial consonant clusters, such as /br/, / kl/, and /pl/, were frequently perceived as /l/ or /r/, leading to the initial stops or fricatives being missed. Errors encompassed the substitution of phonemes with others that are not typically perceptually assimilated into the same native language (L1) categories, which would not be revealed through predefined multiple-choice identification or discrimination tasks.

The Cerebellum Is Sensitive to the Lexical Properties of Words During Spoken Language Comprehension.

Over the past few decades, research into the function of the cerebellum has expanded far beyond the motor domain. A growing number of studies are probing the role of specific cerebellar subregions, such as Crus I and Crus II, in higher-order cognitive functions including receptive language processing. In the current fMRI study, we show evidence for the cerebellum's sensitivity to variation in two well-studied psycholinguistic properties of words-lexical frequency and phonological neighborhood density-during passive, continuous listening of a podcast. To determine whether, and how, activity in the cerebellum correlates with these lexical properties, we modeled each word separately using an amplitude-modulated regressor, time-locked to the onset of each word. At the group level, significant effects of both lexical properties landed in expected cerebellar subregions: Crus I and Crus II. The BOLD signal correlated with variation in each lexical property, consistent with both language-specific and domain-general mechanisms. Activation patterns at the individual level also showed that effects of phonological neighborhood and lexical frequency landed in Crus I and Crus II as the most probable sites, though there was activation seen in other lobules (especially for frequency). Although the exact cerebellar mechanisms used during speech and language processing are not yet evident, these findings highlight the cerebellum's role in word-level processing during continuous listening.

Obsolescence effects in second language phonological networks.

Phonological networks are representations of word forms and their phonological relationships with other words in a given language lexicon. A principle underlying the growth (or evolution) of those networks is preferential attachment, or the "rich-gets-richer" mechanisms, according to which words with many phonological neighbors (or links) are the main beneficiaries of future growth opportunities. Due to their limited number of words, language lexica constitute node-constrained networks where growth cannot keep increasing in a linear way; hence, preferential attachment is likely mitigated by certain factors. The present study investigated obsolescence effects (i.e., a word's finite timespan of being active in terms of growth) in an evolving phonological network of English as a second language. It was found that phonological neighborhoods are constructed by one large initial lexical spurt, followed by sublinear growth spurts that eventually lead to very limited growth in later lexical spurts during network evolution. First-language-given neighborhood densities are rarely reached even by the most advanced language learners. An analysis of the strength of phonological relationships between phonological word forms revealed a tendency to incorporate phonetically more distant phonological neighbors at earlier acquisition stages. Overall, the findings suggest an obsolescence effect in growth that favors younger words. Implications for the second-language lexicon include leveraged learning mechanisms and learning bouts focused on a smaller range of phonological segments, and involve questions concerning lexical processing in aging networks.

Repurposing verbal fluency: Word‐property analysis reveals neurocognitive markers of Hispanics with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment

AbstractBackgroundThough central to dementia assessments, verbal fluency tasks are suboptimally exploited. Performance is typically measured by counting valid responses. This precludes insights on which word types are least accessible to patients, while failing to discriminate among disorders. Alternatively, each word can be decomposed into relevant properties that drive semantic memory retrievability. Recently, our team has combined objective lexical measures with multimodal imaging to examine whether this approach is sensitive to Hispanics with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), vis‐à‐vis others with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).MethodIn Experiment‐1, we recruited 32 AD patients and 32 bvFTD patients, matched with 27 HCs. Experiment‐2 involved 60 persons with MCI and 60 matched HCs. Participants performed phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. We counted valid responses and, using normative databases, extracted quantitative data of six word properties: frequency (occurrences in everyday use), granularity (conceptual specificity), neighborhood (words with similar phonological structure), length (number of syllables), familiarity (subjective recognizability), and imageability (ease of mental visualization). We examined whether these variables were robust to discriminate between groups (via ANOVAs), identify individuals from each cohort (via linear regressions), and capture cognitive, neuroanatomical, and functional connectivity disruptions.ResultsIn Experiment‐1, while both patient groups produced fewer valid responses than HCs, only AD patients showed distinct word properties (higher frequency, lower granularity, more phonological neighbors). Multivariate word properties robustly identified individual AD (but not bvFTD) patients from HCs (AUC = .89), driven by the abovementioned properties. These features correlated with executive outcomes only in AD, and they predicted patients’ anatomical and functional disruptions along temporal, frontal, and cingulate regions. In Experiment‐2, the same word properties differentiated MCI individuals from HCs, with multivariate classification reaching an AUC of .75. These features correlated with the volume of, and connectivity between, temporal and frontal regions that partly overlapped with those observed in AD.ConclusionVerbal fluency tasks can be repurposed to reveal condition‐specific markers of persons with and at increased risk for AD. New avenues emerge towards scalable, low‐cost assessment of Hispanics and, potentially, other underrepresented populations.

Inhibitory and facilitative effects of lexical neighbors in spoken word recognition: The role of language experience

AbstractThe study evaluated whether the direction (inhibitory or facilitative) of the phonological neighborhood density effect in English spoken word recognition was modulated by the relative strength of competitor activation (neighborhood type) in two groups of English-dominant learners of Spanish who differed in language experience. Classroom learners and heritage learners of Spanish identified spoken English words from dense (e.g., BEAR) and sparse (e.g., BOAT) phonological neighborhoods presented in moderate noise. The phonological neighborhood was separately manipulated at word onset (cohort) and word offset (rhyme). Classroom learners were overall slower in recognizing spoken words from denser neighborhoods. Strongly active (onset) neighbors exerted inhibitory effects in both classroom and heritage learners. Critically, weakly active (offset) neighbors exerted inhibitory effects in classroom learners but facilitative effects in heritage learners. The results suggest that the activation of both within and cross-language neighbors should be considered in determining the direction of neighbor effects in bilingual lexical processing.

Evidence for conflict monitoring during speech recognition in noise.

During difficult tasks, conflict can benefit performance on a subsequent trial. One theory for such performance adjustments is that people monitor for conflict and reactively engage cognitive control. This hypothesis has been challenged because tasks that control for associative learning do not show such "cognitive control" effects. The current study experimentally controlled associative learning by presenting a novel stimulus on every trial of a picture-speech conflict task and found that performance adjustments still occur. Thirty-one healthy young adults listened to and repeated words presented in background noise while viewing pictures that were congruent or incongruent (i.e., phonological neighbors) with the word. Following conflict, participants had higher word recognition (+17% points) on incongruent but not congruent trials. This result was not attributable to posterror effects nor a speed-accuracy trade-off. An analysis of erroneous responses showed that participants made more phonologically related errors than nonrelated errors only on incongruent trials, demonstrating elevated phonological conflict when the picture was a neighbor of the target word. Additionally, postconflict improvements appear to be due to better resolution of phonological conflict in the mental lexicon rather than decreased attention to the picture or increased attention to the speech signal. Our findings provide new evidence for conflict monitoring and suggest that cognitive control helps resolve phonological conflict during speech recognition in noise.

Spoken word recognition in French

Different linguistic factors can influence the recognition of spoken words in French. We are interested in the impact of the linguistic factor of phonological density, which refers to the number of phonological neighbours of words and which is related to the recognition process according to a principle of inhibition and lexical competition. By using a lexical decision task, where half of the words have a low phonological density, and the other half a high phonological density, we aim to measure the reaction times of a group of young French-speaking participants (18-35 years old). The results of the young French-speaking group did not show a phonological density effect, however, these results did show a lexicality effect, demonstrating that the word and pseudo-word recognition task worked well. Thus, from the error analyses, the involvement of another factor, word familiarity, was induced. The post-experimental survey on this new factor showed an imbalance between the high and low density groups. By removing the low familiarity items from the analysis, a significant phonological density effect was obtained at this time. It is essential to discuss the role of word familiarity on spoken word recognition; as well as the material development for spoken word recognition tasks.&#x0D;