The role of inhibitory control in spoken word recognition: evidence from cochlear implant users

ABSTRACT

During spoken word recognition, listeners must quickly map sounds to meaning while suppressing competitors. It remains unclear whether domain-general inhibitory control is recruited for resolving lexical competition. Cochlear implant (CI) users present a unique population for addressing this question because they are consistently confronted with degraded auditory input, and may need to rely on domain-general mechanisms to compensate. We examined word recognition in adult CI users who were prelingually deaf (lost their hearing in childhood, N = 21), postlingually deaf (lost their hearing in adulthood, N = 50), and normal hearing controls (NH; N = 71). Participants recognised words during an eye-tracking task and completed an inhibitory control task. CI users were slower to recognise words and did not resolve competition as fully. Better inhibitory control predicted faster word activation in NH controls and postlingual, but not prelingual, CI users. Prolonged experience with acoustic language may thus influence how domain-general mechanisms are recruited for language processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Spoken word recognition
• inhibition
• lexical competition
• cochlear implant

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kristin Rooff and Marissa Huffman for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also investigated the role of device configuration, device experience, and the interaction between device configuration and inhibitory control in the CI users. No additional factors were significant, but the models are available on the OSF repository associated with this project (https://osf.io/g3wmc/).

2 Age was moderately correlated to processing speed (r = .38). We ran the same model after residualizing the effect of age from processing speed, and the results did not change. This analysis can be found on the OSF repository associated with this project (https://osf.io/g3wmc/).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health [grant number P50 000242] to B. Gantz and B. McMurray [grant number DC0008089] to B. McMurray.