title: Headstart for speech segmentation: a neural signature for the anchor word effect.
abstract: Learning a new language is an incremental process that builds upon previously acquired information. To shed light on the mechanisms of this incremental process, we studied the on-line neurophysiological correlates of the so-called anchor word effect where newly learned words facilitate segmentation of novel words from continuous speech. Higher segmentation performance was observed for speech streams embedded with newly learned anchor words. The anchor words elicited an enhanced Stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) component considered to be an index of expectation for incoming relevant information. Moreover, we confirmed a previously reported N400 amplitude increase for the to-be-segmented novel words, indicating a bottom-up learning process whereby new memory representations for the novel words emerge. We propose that the anchor word effect indexed by SPN reflects an expectation for an incoming novel word at the offset of the anchor word, thus facilitating the segmentation process.
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain. Electronic address: tcunillera@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Toni
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Cunillera
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Abo Akademi University, FI-20500 Åbo, Finland. Electronic address: matti.laine@abo.fi.
authors.forename: Matti
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Laine
authors.affiliation: Department of Basic Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain; Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group (Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute) IDIBELL, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain; Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, ICREA, Barcelona, Spain. Electronic address: arfornells@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Antoni
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rodríguez-Fornells
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ERPs; Lexical segmentation; Predictability in learning; Speech segmentation; Statistical language learning