Lexical effects on auditory speech perception: an electrophysiological study.
Lexical information can bias categorization of an ambiguous phoneme and subsequently evoke a shift in the phonetic boundary. Here, we explored the extent to which this phenomenon is perceptual in nature. Listeners were asked to ignore auditory stimuli presented in a typical oddball sequence in which the standard was an ambiguous sound halfway between /t/ and /p/ embedded in a Dutch word normally ending in /t/ ('vloot', meaning 'fleet') or /p/ ('hoop', meaning 'hope'). As deviant served the non-ambiguous sound /t/ embedded in the same context. The amplitude of the MMN-response, indexing the perceptual difference between the ambiguous sound and unambiguous /t/ was bigger for the p-word 'hoop' than the t-word 'vloot'. This result is taken as an indication that lexical information actually reached down to early perceptual processing stages.
van Linden
Sabine
S
Psychonomics Laboratory, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Stekelenburg
Jeroen J
JJ
Tuomainen
Jyrki
J
Vroomen
Jean
J
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult