Gaze fixations to phonological competitors can expose how context shapes lexical competition.

Evidence

To address the question of how semantic context affects lexical competition between phonologically similar words the statistical analyses focus on listeners’ gaze fixations towards the phonological competitor and the semantic distractor. The probabilities of gaze fixations towards this competitor and this distractor were statically analyzed by means of growth curves (Mirman 2014 ). R (R Core team 2013 ) with lme4 package (Bates et al. 2014 ) was used to model the time curves of fixations as 4th order polynomials within the time window of 200–2000 ms after word onset. Two logistic-regression multi-level models were used, with fixations to either the phonological competitor or the semantic distractor, coded as a binomial response. The time course curves were described in four terms: intercept, the overall slope of the curve, the width of the rise and fall around the inflection, and the curvature in the tails. The probability of fixations along the time course was modeled as a function of Context (neutral versus context), Presentation (NS versus DS) and the possible three-way interactions between these two factors and all four terms describing the curves. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3974