How do you know I was about to say “book”? Anticipation processes affect speech processing and lexical recognition

Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Foucart, Alice, Ruiz Tada, Elisa, 1984-, Costa, Albert, 1970-
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/35229
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35229
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1016047
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Anticipation processes
Speech processing
Spoken word recognition
ERPs
Top-down information
Descripción
Sumario:Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory sentences. In high-constrained Spanish sentences, we time-locked ERPs on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mismatched the gender of the expected nouns triggered an early (200–280 ms) and a late negativity (450–900 ms), suggesting that anticipation processes are at play also during speech processing. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that (muted) “expected” words were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than (muted) “unexpected” words, and as often as “old” words that were actually presented. These results suggest that anticipation processes allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation. The findings support a top-down view of spoken sentence comprehension.