The Sense of Sounds: Brain Responses to Phonotactic Frequency, Phonological Grammar and Lexical Meaning

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Susana Silva¹  Marina Vigário²  Barbara Leone Fernandez³  Rita Jerónimo⁴  Kai Alter²  Sónia Frota² 

[1] Neurocognition and Language Group, Center for Psychology at University of Porto;Center of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon;Department of Psychology, Università Degli Studi di Torino;Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL);Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, United Kingdom

关键词: phonological processing;    words;    nonwords;    pseudowords;    phonotactic frequency;    lexical-semantic processing;    ERPs;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00681

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Two outstanding questions in spoken-language comprehension concern (1) the interplay of phonological grammar (legal vs. illegal sound sequences), phonotactic frequency (high- vs. low-frequency sound sequences) and lexicality (words vs. other sound sequences) in a meaningful context, and (2) how the properties of phonological sequences determine their inclusion or exclusion from lexical-semantic processing. In the present study, we used a picture-sound priming paradigm to examine the ERP responses of adult listeners to grammatically illegal sound sequences, to grammatically legal sound sequences (pseudowords) with low- vs. high-frequency, and to real words that were either congruent or incongruent to the picture context. Results showed less negative N1-P2 responses for illegal sequences and low-frequency pseudowords (with differences in topography), but not high-frequency ones. Low-frequency pseudowords also showed an increased P3 component. However, just like illegal sequences, neither low- nor high-frequency pseudowords differed from congruent words in the N400. Thus, phonotactic frequency had an impact before, but not during lexical-semantic processing. Our results also suggest that phonological grammar, phonotactic frequency and lexicality may follow each other in this order during word processing.

【 授权许可】

CC BY