Forehearing words: Pre-activation of word endings at word onset

Abstract

Occurring at rates up to 6-7 syllables per second, speech perception and understanding involves rapid identification of speech sounds and pre-activation of morphemes and words. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the time-course and neural sources of pre-activation of word endings as participants heard the beginning of unfolding words. ERPs showed a pre-activation negativity (PrAN) for word beginnings (first two segmental phonemes) with few possible completions. PrAN increased gradually as the number of possible completions of word onsets decreased and the lexical frequency of the completions increased. The early brain potential effect for few possible word completions was associated with a blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast increase in Broca's area (pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus) and angular gyrus of the left parietal lobe. We suggest early involvement of the left prefrontal cortex in inhibiting irrelevant left parietal activation during lexical selection. The results further our understanding of the importance of Broca's area in rapid online pre-activation of words.

Slowly but surely: Interpreting facilitates L2 morphological anticipation based on suprasegmental and segmental information

“…The hypothesis that monolinguals would use suprasegmental and segmental information to predict a word's suffix was supported. Our data are consistent with prior studies showing that natives use suprasegmental information to predict morphological information (tone: Roll, 2015; Söderström et al, 2012) and syntactic information (intonation: Nakamura et al, 2012; Weber et al, 2006; pauses between clauses: Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999), and segmental information to anticipate morphological information (syllabic structure: Sagarra & Casillas, 2018; phonotactic probability: Roll et al, 2017). The influence of these linguistic variables is so robust that listeners anticipate a word's suffix even when it is not present (Sagarra & Casillas, 2018; Söderström, Horne & Roll, 2017).…”

“…As a result, the mere presence of a coda may be perceived as more salient acoustically (Hahn & Bailey, 2005) or articulatory (Côté, 1997) to the listener. Crucial to our study, the structure of a word's first syllable can reduce competition during lexical access (Cholin et al, 2006), such that initial segments with fewer possible and more frequent endings trigger stronger preactivation (Roll et al, 2017). In other words, the syllable structure of a lexical item might aid anticipatory processes before morphological information becomes available.…”

“…We tested four hypotheses. First, based on studies showing that natives use suprasegmental information (Swedish tone: Roll et al, 2010, 2013; Söderstrom et al, 2015; Schremm et al, 2016; English vowel duration: Rehrig, 2017; Spanish stress: Sagarra & Casillas, 2018) and segmental information (Swedish phonotactic frequency: Roll et al, 2017; Spanish syllabic structure: Sagarra & Casillas, 2018) to anticipate inflectional morphology during spoken word recognition, we predicted that monolinguals would use both stress and syllable structure. Second, we assumed that monolinguals anticipate earlier and faster than non-interpreter L2 learners, considering that lexical stress is a stronger cue for lexical disambiguation in Spanish (Soto-Faraco et al, 2001) than in English (Cooper et al, 2002).…”

Representational pattern similarity of electrical brain activity reveals rapid and specific prediction during language comprehension

“…Effects can even be seen on determiners or modifiers, when these have specific gender or phonological characteristics (e.g. "a kite") that are consistent or inconsistent with an anticipated noun ("an … kite") [10,15,[32][33][34][35], as well as within 150 ms following word onsets that can differentiate between words with many possible continuations and words with few [36][37].…”

Theta oscillations mediate pre-activation of highly expected word initial phonemes

“…Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, evidence for pre-target word activation is still scarce, and has come only from studies where words are presented visually. Although top-down influences on sensory areas have been well documented in the auditory domain 18 , 19 , these have always focused on response to the actual word and have thus examined processing differences once initial sensory input is available.…”