Asymmetries in Accessing Vowel Representations Are Driven by Phonological and Acoustic Properties: Neural and Behavioral Evidence From Natural German Minimal Pairs

Abstract

In vowel discrimination, commonly found discrimination patterns are directional asymmetries where discrimination is faster (or easier) if differing vowels are presented in a certain sequence compared to the reversed sequence. Different models of speech sound processing try to account for these asymmetries based on either phonetic or phonological properties. In this study, we tested and compared two of those often-discussed models, namely the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model (Lahiri and Reetz, 2002) and the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework (Polka and Bohn, 2011). While most studies presented isolated vowels, we investigated a large stimulus set of German vowels in a more naturalistic setting within minimal pairs. We conducted an mismatch negativity (MMN) study in a passive and a reaction time study in an active oddball paradigm. In both data sets, we found directional asymmetries that can be explained by either phonological or phonetic theories. While behaviorally, the vowel discrimination was based on phonological properties, both tested models failed to explain the found neural patterns comprehensively. Therefore, we additionally examined the influence of a variety of articulatory, acoustical, and lexical factors (e.g., formant structure, intensity, duration, and frequency of occurrence) but also the influence of factors beyond the well-known (perceived loudness of vowels, degree of openness) in depth via multiple regression analyses. The analyses revealed that the perceptual factor of perceived loudness has a greater impact than considered in the literature and should be taken stronger into consideration when analyzing preattentive natural vowel processing.

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

“…Perceptual asymmetries have also been observed in vowel perception, with discrimination performance depending on the order in which the stimuli are presented. Several behavioral studies have shown that is easier to discriminate contrasts that move from more central to more peripheral, and thus more acoustically focal, regions of the vowel space than when the same stimuli are presented in the opposite direction (Masapollo et al, 2017;Polka & Bohn, 2003; however, neurophysiological evidence for these asymmetries is less robust (de Rue et al, 2021;Polka et al, 2021;Riedinger et al, 2021). In addition to vowel peripherality and focality, prototypicality and frequency also result in perceptual asymmetries (Kuhl et al, 1992(Kuhl et al, , 2008.…”

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

“…Perceptual asymmetries have also been observed in vowel perception, with discrimination performance depending on the order in which the stimuli are presented. Several behavioural studies have shown that is easier to discriminate contrasts that move from more central to more peripheral, and thus more acoustically focal, regions of the vowel space than when the same stimuli are presented in the opposite direction (Masapollo et al, 2017;Polka & Bohn, 2003; however, neurophysiological evidence for these asymmetries is less robust (de Rue et al, 2021;Polka et al, 2021;Riedinger et al, 2021). In addition to vowel peripherality and focality, prototypicality and frequency also result in perceptual asymmetries (Kuhl et al, 1992(Kuhl et al, , 2008.…”

Mismatch Negativity (MMN): Komponen Event-Related Potentials (ERP) sebagai Penanda Aktivitas Otomatis Otak dalam Mendeteksi Perubahan

“…pelanggaran sintaksis pada bahasa ibu (Hanna et al, 2017;Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003;Pulvermüller et al, 2008), kandungan semantik emosional (Zora et al, 2020), efek pelatihan bahasa (Aleksandrov et al, 2019), serta informasi prosodi seperti penekanan nada suara komparatif baik antar bahasa (Garami et al, 2017;Honbolygó et al, 2020) maupun aksen regional (Brunellière et al, 2011). Penelitian mengenai representasi fonemik (Cummings et al, 2021;Riedinger et al, 2021) menemukan adanya asimetris MMN di mana beberapa suara ucap menimbulkan MMN sementara suara lain tidak.…”