Degraded speech delays lexical competition toward phonological competitors by about 300 ms

Evidence

For the fixations to the phonological competitor, as significant emerged the three way interactions with the first term (the intercept) of the curve (χ 2(18) = 28476, p < 0.001, the interaction with the quadratic term (the slope), (χ 2(18) = 28184, p < 0.001), the interaction between the cubic term (rise and fall around the central inflection), (χ 2(18) = 27632, p < 0.001), and the quartic term (curvature in the tails), (χ 2(18) = 27651, p < 0.05). The interaction with the intercept shows that the context sentences reduced the area under the fixation curves to the competitor for NS (red lines in Fig. 1a versus b ), and that this reduction was smaller for DS (red lines in Fig. 1c versus d ). The interaction with the slope shows that the growth of fixations to the competitor is shallower for DS in the neutral context than it is for NS in neutral context. The interaction with the cubic term reflects that the location of the peak of fixations towards the competitor in DS is delayed for about 300 ms relative to the location of the peak for NS, and that the course of this curve is more symmetric than for NS, and this mainly for the items presented in neutral context. The interaction with the quartic term reflects a slower decline of fixations towards the competitor in DS versus NS, and shallower for items in context than in neutral sentences. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3985

The statistical analysis revealed significant three way interactions with Context (N versus C) and Presentation (NS versus DS) on all terms describing the curves: Intercept (χ 2 (3) = 301.90, p < 0.001), slope (χ 2 (3) = 145.3, p < 0.001), and the cubic term, the curvature around the peak (χ 2 (3) = 272.52, p < 0.001). This implies that pupil dilation was sensitive in capturing the reduced effect of lexical competition in the context sentences versus neutral context, but this effect was delayed and smaller in DS than in NS. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3978

Categorization

• XREF: Pupil dilation as an index of listening effort connects to the reader’s broader psychophysiology of hearing work, and to Winn et al. 2015 on degraded speech effort. — connects to: Speech perception resolves word candidate competition before a decision is made
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3985; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3978