Poster D58, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
The time-course of lexical and sub-lexical processing in language production versus perception as revealed by event-related brain potentials.
Kristof Strijkers1, Amie Fairs1, Amandine Michelas1, Sophie Dufour1;1Université Aix-Marseille & CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage
While our knowledge on the brain basis of language production and perception is impressive, one major drawback is that the different language behaviors are typically studied in isolation. Language production and perception were long considered to rely on mainly separate processing systems and by consequence followed their own research traditions where evidence from one modality entered theories from the respective other modality only sparsely. Nonetheless, by now most researchers would agree that there is more interaction and potential overlap between the production and perception of words than originally assumed. Therefore, an important question concerns the degree of overlap (and dissociation) between the different linguistic behaviours in order to establish brain language models that embrace both modalities. In the current study we systematically compared the temporal dynamics of word component activation between production and perception. The same participants (N=26) spoke (object naming) and listened to (semantic classification of spoken words) the same stimuli while recording their electroencephalography (EEG) online. To assess lexico-semantic processing we manipulated the lexical frequency of the words and to assess phonological-phonetic processing we manipulated the biphone frequency of the words. The objective was to track ‘when’ the lexical versus biphone frequency effects would emerge in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and compare that time-course between the language production and perception tasks. Preliminary analyses of the data show that in the production task the lexical and biphone frequency effects emerged simultaneously between 210 and 270 ms after stimulus onset. In the perception task the biphone frequency effect emerged 180 to 335 ms after stimulus onset while the lexical frequency effect did not reach significance. Taken together, these preliminary results suggest that lexical and sub-lexical processing manifest in parallel in speech production and with an overlapping time-course for sub-lexical processing in speech perception. Such data pattern is hard to reconcile with traditional hierarchical sequential models of language production and perception, respectively, which would have predicted that lexical access precedes sub-lexical encoding in production and vice versa in perception. Instead, the data may indicate that both language behaviours rely on similar parallel processing dynamics.
Themes: Language Production, Perception: Auditory
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)