How does the provision of semantic information influence the lexicalization of new spoken words?

Abstract

The integration of a novel spoken word with existing lexical items can proceed within 24 hours of learning its phonological form. However, previous studies have reported that lexical integration of new spoken words can be delayed if semantic information is provided during learning. One possibility is that this delay in lexical integration reflects reduced phonological processing during learning as a consequence of the need to learn the semantic associations. In the current study, adult participants learnt novel words via a phoneme monitoring task, in which half of the words were associated with a picture referent, and half were phonological forms only. Critically, participants were instructed to learn the forms of the novel words, with no explicit goal to learn the word-picture mappings. Results revealed significant lexical competition effects emerging one week after consolidation, which were equivalent for the picture-present and form-only conditions. Tests of declarative memory and shadowing showed equivalent performance for picture-present and form-only words, despite participants showing good knowledge of the picture associations immediately after learning. These data support the contention that provided phonological information is recruited sufficiently well during learning, the provision of semantic information does not slow the time-course of lexical integration.

Semantic and phonological schema influence spoken word learning and overnight consolidation

“…Encountering and memorizing a picture of an unfamiliar object might present a significant cognitive load that could detract from the process of encoding the spoken words and hence make word learning more difficult. However, if this were the case, participants should have been worse at learning word-forms paired with unfamiliar objects than word-forms presented in isolation, which, like Hawkins & Rastle (2016), we did not observe. We therefore suggest that our results reflect a positive effect of learning spoken words associated with familiar object pictures rather than difficulties with processing unfamiliar object pictures.…”

“…Furthermore, retrieval of picture-associated, relative to form-only, novel words showed greater activation of the hippocampal memory system, also suggesting reduced integration into neocortical systems. However, in a behavioural study, Hawkins & Rastle (2016) found equivalent lexical competition from picture-associated and form-only novel words if phonological forms are learned sufficiently well during training. They found that the presence of novel objects during learning did not interfere with lexical competition effects that emerged a week after training, when the training task emphasised phonological form rather than form-meaning learning.…”

Multisensory Connections of Novel Linguistic Stimuli in Japanese as a Native Language and Referential Tastes

“…The current findings uniquely show the memory performances of linguistic forms on a single day of learning of linguistic and gustatory stimuli for healthy subjects, while previous studies show the memory performances of linguistic forms on a single day learning or multiple days learning of linguistic and visual, auditory, or haptic stimuli for healthy subjects [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Other research has also reported the learning effects of linguistic and gustatory features for people with word (lexical)-gustatory synesthesia [26] or with autism [21,22].…”

Pictorial Referents Facilitate Recognition and Retrieval Speeds of Associations Between Novel Words in a Second Language (L2) and Referents

“…According to these three levels of processing, the associative learning of the verbal (word forms) and nonverbal stimuli (referents) would be essential to learn real words. Previous studies have reported that word forms can be associated with referents or with words already associated with referents through associative learning, in which participants learned associative pairs of a word form and referent(s), including pictures or sounds (Paivio and Csapo, 1973;Cornelissen et al, 2004;Breitenstein et al, 2005;Hultén et al, 2009;Tsukiura et al, 2010;Tsukiura et al, 2011;Kambara et al, 2013;Takashima et al, 2014;Ferreira et al, 2015;Grönholm et al, 2015;Hawkins et al, 2015;Hawkins and Rastle, 2016;Takashima et al, 2017;Havas et al, 2018;Li et al, 2020;Horinouchi et al, under review;Yan et al, under review;Yang et al, under review) or lexical conditioning (researchers also call the conditioning classical, semantic, or evaluative), in which participants generalize the referents (evaluative responses; e.g., positive and negative meanings) of real words to referents of pseudowords, real words, or symbols (Razran, 1939;Staats and Staats, 1957;Staats and Staats, 1958;Staats et al, 1959a;Staats et al, 1959b;Staats et al, 1961;Paivio, 1964;Cicero and Tryon, 1989;Tryon and Cicero, 1989;Till and Priluck, 2001;Hughes et al, 2018). In the associative learning of word forms in a first language (L1) or a second language (L2) and referents, differences between modalities of referents could affect task performance in the test phase (Lee et al, 2003;Jeong et al, 2010;Carpen...…”