Effects of acoustic distortion and semantic context on event-related potentials to spoken words.

This study examined the neurophysiological effects of acoustic degradation on auditory semantic processing. Event-related potentials were recorded to target words presented in a sentence context. Targets were semantically congruent or incongruent with the context, which was acoustically intact or low-pass filtered. In unaltered contexts, N400 amplitude was significantly greater for incongruent than congruent words. Filtering significantly reduced this effect, even though participants were highly accurate in interpreting the degraded stimuli, as shown by an anomaly detection task. This reduction in the N400 effect appeared to be driven by decreased N400 amplitudes over posterior electrode sites for incongruent targets. These results demonstrate that acoustic degradation influences the neural response to words in context by reducing the availability of semantic information in on-line sentence comprehension.

[1]  L. Bauer,et al.  N400 as an index of semantic expectancies: Differential effects of alcohol and cocaine dependence , 2005, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

[2]  M. Kutas,et al.  Event-related brain potentials to grammatical errors and semantic anomalies , 1983, Memory & cognition.

[3]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Phonological factors in lexical access: Evidence from an auditory lexical decision task , 1988 .

[4]  F. Dick,et al.  Language deficits, localization, and grammar: evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in aphasic patients and neurologically intact individuals. , 2001, Psychological review.

[5]  E. Cardillo,et al.  Effects of Competing Speech on Sentence-Word Priming: Semantic, Perceptual, and Attentional Factors , 2001 .

[6]  P. Holcomb.  Semantic priming and stimulus degradation: implications for the role of the N400 in language processing. , 2007, Psychophysiology.

[7]  D E Meyer,et al.  Meaning, memory structure, and mental processes. , 1976, Science.

[8]  R. Näätänen,et al.  A Paradigm to Measure Mismatch Negativity Responses to Phonetic and Acoustic Changes in Parallel , 2003, Audiology and Neurotology.

[9]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  Lexical-semantic event-related potential effects in patients with left hemisphere lesions and aphasia, and patients with right hemisphere lesions without aphasia. , 1996, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[10]  M. Sommers,et al.  Inhibitory processes and spoken word recognition in young and older adults: the interaction of lexical competition and semantic context. , 1999, Psychology and aging.

[11]  Morton Ann Gernsbacher,et al.  Cerebral Mechanisms for Suppression of Inappropriate Information during Sentence Comprehension , 1996, Brain and Language.

[12]  M. Kutas,et al.  Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association , 1984, Nature.

[13]  G. Mulder,et al.  Language, memory, and aging: an electrophysiological exploration of the N400 during reading of memory-demanding sentences. , 1995, Psychophysiology.

[14]  N. Phillips,et al.  Age-related differences in semantic priming: evidence from event-related brain potentials. , 2000, Brain and cognition.

[15]  D P Salmon,et al.  Event-related brain potentials during semantic categorization in normal aging and senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type. , 1996, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[16]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  Understanding ambiguous words in sentence contexts: electrophysiological evidence for delayed contextual selection in Broca’s aphasia , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[17]  Elizabeth Bates,et al.  Effects of acoustic distortion and semantic context on lexical access , 2004 .

[18]  H. Neville,et al.  The Neurobiology of Sensory and Language Processing in Language-Impaired Children , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[19]  H. Neville,et al.  Natural speech processing: An analysis using event-related brain potentials , 1991, Psychobiology.

[20]  J. H. Neely.  Semantic priming effects in visual word recognition: A selective review of current findings and theories. , 1991 .

[21]  T. Picton,et al.  The N1 wave of the human electric and magnetic response to sound: a review and an analysis of the component structure. , 1987, Psychophysiology.

[22]  T. Carr,et al.  Words, pictures, and priming: on semantic activation, conscious identification, and the automaticity of information processing. , 1982, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[23]  H. Neville,et al.  Language and , 2019, Adventure Diffusion.

[24]  Kara D. Federmeier,et al.  Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[25]  M. Kutas,et al.  The N400 in a semantic categorization task across 6 decades. , 1998, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[26]  M. Kutas,et al.  Interactions between sentence context and word frequencyinevent-related brainpotentials , 1990, Memory & cognition.

[27]  S. Luck.  An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique , 2005 .

[28]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects on word recognition , 1984, Memory & cognition.

[29]  Margot J. Taylor,et al.  Guidelines for using human event-related potentials to study cognition: recording standards and publication criteria. , 2000, Psychophysiology.

[30]  L Hasher,et al.  Aging and suppression: memory for previously relevant information. , 1991, Psychology and aging.

[31]  H. Neville,et al.  Visual and auditory sentence processing: A developmental analysis using event‐related brain potentials , 1992 .

[32]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia: Event-related Potential Evidence for a Lexical Integration Deficit , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[33]  M. Kutas,et al.  Association of schizotypy with semantic processing differences: An event-related brain potential study , 2005, Schizophrenia Research.

[34]  R. Knight,et al.  Neural Mechanisms of Involuntary Attention to Acoustic Novelty and Change , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[35]  S. Blumstein,et al.  The effect of subphonetic differences on lexical access , 1994, Cognition.

[36]  Peter Hagoort,et al.  The Processing Nature of the N400: Evidence from Masked Priming , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[37]  John F Connolly,et al.  The influence of increased working memory load on semantic neural systems: a high-resolution event-related brain potential study. , 2005, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[38]  M. Kiefer,et al.  Time course of conscious and unconscious semantic brain activation , 2000, Neuroreport.

[39]  Kara D. Federmeier,et al.  Aging in context: age-related changes in context use during language comprehension. , 2005, Psychophysiology.

[40]  Ursula Bellugi,et al.  Bridging cognition, the brain and molecular genetics: evidence from Williams syndrome , 1999, Trends in Neurosciences.

[41]  A. Friederici,et al.  Noise affects auditory and linguistic processing differently: an MEG study , 2000, Neuroreport.

[42]  D Y von Cramon,et al.  Language related brain potentials in patients with cortical and subcortical left hemisphere lesions. , 1999, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[43]  J. T. Marsh,et al.  Event-related potentials in high-functioning adult autistics: Linguistic and nonlinguistic visual information processing tasks , 1993, Neuropsychologia.

[44]  Marta Kutas,et al.  The impact of semantic memory organization and sentence context information on spoken language processing by younger and older adults: an ERP study. , 2002, Psychophysiology.

[45]  Marcel Adam Just,et al.  Reduced resources and specific impairments in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension , 1995 .

[46]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Semantic Facutation in Aphasia: Effects of Time and Expectancy , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[47]  K. Stanovich,et al.  On priming by a sentence context. , 1983, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[48]  H. Neville,et al.  Language processing in men at risk for alcoholism: an event-related potential study. , 1985, Alcohol.

[49]  W Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Levels of perceptual representation and process in lexical access: words, phonemes, and features. , 1994, Psychological review.

[50]  Sheila E. Blumstein,et al.  Mapping from Sound to Meaning: Reduced Lexical Activation in Broca's Aphasics , 2001, Brain and Language.

[51]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Effects of subphonetic and syllable structure variation on word recognition , 2000, Perception & psychophysics.