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Poster E21, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall

Exploring the mechanisms of adult word learning by modulating temporal congruency and object modality

Samuel H. Cosper1, Claudia Männel2,3, Jutta L. Mueller1;1University of Osnabrück, 2Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 3University of Leipzig

Everyday life is filled with objects and events occurring in different modalities. Recently, it has been shown that infants are capable of learning labels for auditory objects (e.g., thunder) similar to the way that infants associate labels for visual objects (e.g., bottle). Unlike infants, typically developed adults have a strong bias towards the visual modality. This preference for visual input leads to the question of whether the modality of an object has an influence on the learning mechanisms behind mapping novel labels onto objects in adulthood. Furthermore, does the timing in which the object-word pairs are presented also play a role in how labels are mapped onto novel objects within the different modalities? The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigates in four experiments the mechanisms behind adult word learning by applying a 2x2 study modulating the modality of the object and the temporal congruency of the object-word pairs. The four experiments consist of auditory object (environmental sounds)-auditory word (spoken word) stimuli presented with a 600 ms within-pair pause, visual object (pictures of novel objects)-auditory with a 600 ms within-pair pause, visual-auditory with a 500 ms overlap of stimuli presentation, and auditory-auditory with a 500 ms presentation overlap. Each experiment was divided into a training phase, where sets of consistently and inconsistently paired object and labels were presented, and a testing phase, where the consistent object-label pairs of the training phase were presented in matching or mismatching combinations. The testing phase ERP results only exhibited a N400 violated-expectation effect for mismatching over matching pairs for visual objects, regardless of temporal congruency. Adult ERPs did not yield any increased negativity for violated pairs including auditory objects in either temporal condition. These results provide evidence that the modality of the object influences the mechanisms behind adult word learning; however, temporal congruency does not affect learning in the same way. The data suggest that the dominance of the visual modality in adulthood modulates associative word learning and thus learning is not as flexible as in infancy.

Themes: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Perception: Auditory
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)

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