The time-course of talker-specificity and lexical competition effects during word learning

Abstract

Three experiments examined the time-course of talker-specificity and lexical competition effects during spoken word learning. Talker-specificity effects depend on access to highly detailed lexical representations, whilst lexical competition may exploit more abstract representations. By tracking the time-courses of these effects concurrently we examined whether there was a common mechanism underlying their storage and retention. Talker-specificity effects on recognition of novel words were robust immediately after study and were generally stable over the course of a week. In contrast, lexical competition effects emerged only at delayed test points. This time-course dissociation supports a dual-system model of lexical processing in which episodic representations of new words are generated rapidly, but robust representations underlying lexical competition emerge only after a period of offline consolidation.

Keywords:

• word learning
• lexical representation
• memory consolidation
• indexical specificity
• lexical competition

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alex Reid and Lisa Henderson for their help in producing the audio recordings for Experiment 3. Old/new categorisation data from these experiments were presented in the following conference proceedings paper: Brown, H. & Gaskell, M.G. (2011). The time-course of TSEs for newly learned pseudowords: Evidence for a hybrid model of lexical representation. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011, ISCA, Florence, Italy.

Funding

The research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship awarded to HB and an ESRC Grant [ES/E015263/1] awarded to MGG.

Notes

1. Error and RT data from the phoneme monitoring task were lost for one participant in Experiment 1 due to a technical fault that occurred at the end of the task. However, since the participant had completed the phoneme monitoring task prior to the fault data from this participant were still included in the lexical decision and old/new categorisation analyses.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: The research was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship awarded to HB and an ESRC Grant [ES/E015263/1] awarded to MGG.