Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (1)
Year of publication
- 2017 (1)
Document Type
- Article (1)
Language
- English (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (1)
Keywords
- Auditory N1 (1)
- Mandarin Chinese (1)
- event-related potential (1)
- language (1)
- lexical access (1)
- short-term habituation (1)
- spoken word (1)
Institute
An auditory habituation design was used to investigate whether lexical-level phonological representations in the brain can be rapidly accessed after the onset of a spoken word. We studied the N1 component of the auditory event-related electrical potential, and measured the amplitude decrements of N1 associated with the repetition of a monosyllabic tone word and an acoustically similar pseudo-word in Mandarin Chinese. Effects related to the contrastive onset consonants were controlled for by introducing two control words. We show that repeated pseudo-words consistently elicit greater amplitude decrements in N1 than real words. Furthermore, this lexicality effect is free from sensory fatigue or rapid learning of the pseudo-word. These results suggest that a lexical-level phonological representation of a spoken word can be accessed as early as 110ms after the onset of the word-form.