Repository logo
 

Phonological and syntactic competition effects in spoken word recognition: evidence from corpus-based statistics.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Change log

Authors

Zhuang, Jie 
Devereux, Barry J 

Abstract

As spoken language unfolds over time the speech input transiently activates multiple candidates at different levels of the system - phonological, lexical, and syntactic - which in turn leads to short-lived between-candidate competition. In an fMRI study, we investigated how different kinds of linguistic competition may be modulated by the presence or absence of a prior context (Tyler 1984; Tyler et al. 2008). We found significant effects of lexico-phonological competition for isolated words, but not for words in short phrases, with high competition yielding greater activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior temporal regions. This suggests that phrasal contexts reduce lexico-phonological competition by eliminating form-class inconsistent cohort candidates. A corpus-derived measure of lexico-syntactic competition was associated with greater activation in LIFG for verbs in phrases, but not for isolated verbs, indicating that lexico-syntactic information is boosted by the phrasal context. Together, these findings indicate that LIFG plays a general role in resolving different kinds of linguistic competition.

Description

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Taylor and Francis via https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1241886

Keywords

Cohort competition, argument structure, corpus data, lexico-syntactic competition, subcategorisation frames

Journal Title

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2327-3798
2327-3801

Volume Title

Publisher

Taylor & Francis
Sponsorship
This research was funded by an EPSRC, UK, grant to Lorraine K. Tyler [grant number EP/F030061/1], and by the European Research Council under the European Commission Seventh Fra- mework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) [grant number 249640] to Lorraine K. Tyler.