Eye movement evidence for an immediate Ganong effect.

Abstract

Listeners tend to categorize an ambiguous speech sound so that it forms a word with its context (Ganong, 1980). This effect could reflect feedback from the lexicon to phonemic activation (McClelland & Elman, 1986), or the operation of a task-specific phonemic decision system (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000). Because the former account involves feedback between lexical and phonemic levels, it predicts that the lexicon's influence on phonemic decisions should be delayed and should gradually increase in strength. Previous response time experiments have not delivered a clear verdict as to whether this is the case, however. In 2 experiments, listeners' eye movements were tracked as they categorized phonemes using visually displayed response options. Lexically relevant information in the signal, the timing of which was confirmed by separate gating experiments, immediately increased eye movements toward the lexically supported response. This effect on eye movements then diminished over the course of the trial rather than continuing to increase. These results challenge the lexical feedback account. The present work also introduces a novel method for analyzing data from 'visual-world' type tasks, designed to assess when an experimental manipulation influences the probability of an eye movement toward the target. (PsycINFO Database Record

What Are You Waiting For? Real‐Time Integration of Cues for Fricatives Suggests Encapsulated Auditory Memory

“…However, they investigated the much easier s/f contrast, and in word-final fricatives, where the vocoid is heard before the fricative, and no more information arrive after it (lessening the need for a buffer). More important, Kingston et al (2016) showed what appears to be immediate use of frication spectra for word initial fricatives. This study, which was published after we completed data collection for this project, also examined the s/f distinction.…”

“…However, as we argued in Experiment 4, listeners may be capable of making a decision when forced to, even if they do not do so in uninterrupted processing. A more serious discrepancy arises from Kingston et al (2016), who show some evidence of early use of frication in the /s/ vs. /f/ contrast. However, they did not perform the kind of analysis needed to compare the use of frication to other cues, and there are numerous methodological issues that undercut the ability of this study to support immediate integration.…”

“…For example, voice onset time (VOT, the dominant cue for distinguishing /b/ from /p/) precedes vowel length (VL, a secondary cue, described in more detail shortly). Prior work supports continuous cascades (McMurray, Clayards, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, ; Toscano & McMurray, , ): Lexical level processing is sensitive to VOT from the earliest moments, and it is later updated by VL (see also Kingston, Levy, Rysling, & Staub, ; Mitterer & Reinisch, ; Reinisch & Sjerps, ). That is, even before both cues are available, the next level up (lexical activation) has access to the preliminary evidence for whether the sound is /b/ or /p/.…”

“…Kingston et al. () showed immediate use of lexical information on speech perception (the Ganong effect), and Mitterer and Reinisch () showed that retuned phoneme categories immediately bias perception. Similarly, it has long been known that word frequency affects lexical processing from the earliest moments of perception (Dahan, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, ; Dufour, Brunellière, & Frauenfelder, ).…”

“…More important, Kingston et al. () showed what appears to be immediate use of frication spectra for word initial fricatives. This study, which was published after we completed data collection for this project, also examined the s/f distinction.…”