The path from sound to sense crosses several disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately, compelling early demonstrations of categorical perception helped to create a historical wedge between speech and word recognition. This talk highlights some advantages of the reintegration of these fields. First, task-dependencies found in studies of speech perception suggest lexical processes as a more appropr...

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded to investigate the role of pitch accent and lexical tone in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese was used as material to explore the potential difference in the nature and time course of brain responses to sentence meaning as indicated by pitch accent and to lexical meaning as indicated by tone. In both cases, the pitch...

There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show increased amplitudes in the visual M100 component, th...

Anomic aphasia is a disturbance affecting lexical retrieval. Nonetheless, persons with this disorder may also experience difficulties in the construction of coherent narratives. Whether this symptom is a sign of a macrolinguistic difficulty per se or reflects the lexical disorder is still an open debate. In order to analyze the effect of the lexical impairment on macrolinguistic processing, we ...

The role of sub-cortical structures such as the striatum in language remains a controversial issue. Based on linguistic claims that language processing implies both recovery of lexical information and application of combinatorial rules it has been shown that striatal damaged patients have difficulties applying conjugation rules while lexical recovery of irregular forms is broadly spared (e.g., ...

This paper considers the nature of lexical knowledge and its role in language and information processing. The lexicon is the central component of language and plays a pivotal role in current linguistic theory [3, 4] and, increasingly, in natural language processing systems [5-7]. The lexicon embodies information about the lexical items of the language and serves as the foundation for morphologi...

Early perceptual processing capabilities are likely to contribute to the categorization of lexical vs. grammatical words by newborns. This lexical categorization could be performed by detecting differences in the prosodic structure of these word categories. We demonstrated that this lexical categorization could be performed using many prosodic cues (duration, F0, energy and formants) automatica...

The aim of this study was to investigate individual differences in the influence of lexical association on word recognition during auditory sentence processing. Lexical associations among individual words (e.g. salt and pepper) represent one type of semantic information that is available during the processing of words in context. We predicted that individuals would vary in their sensitivity to ...

Two phoneme goodness rating experiments addressed the role of orthographic knowledge in the evaluation of speech sounds. Ratings for the best tokens of /s/ were higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words where /s/ was spelled with C (e.g., voice). This difference did not appear for analogous nonwords for which every lexical neighbour had either S or C spelling (pless, floice). M...

The extent to which a symbolic time–series (a sequence of sounds or letters) is a typical word of a language, referred to as WORDLIKENESS, has been shown to have effects in speech perception and production, reading proficiency, lexical development and lexical access, short–term and long–term verbal memory. Two quantitative models have been suggested to account for these effects: serial phonotac...