This study tested the effect of constraining sentence context on word recognition time (RT) in the first and second language. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers of English performed self-paced reading and listening tasks to see whether a semantically-rich preceding context would lead to the activation of a probable upcoming word prior to…

In connected speech, phonological assimilation to neighboring words can lead to pronunciation variants (e.g., "garden bench" [arrow right] "garde'm' bench"). A large body of literature suggests that listeners use the phonetic context to reconstruct the intended word for assimilation types that often lead to incomplete assimilations (e.g., a…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

The goal of this dissertation is to examine how brain regions respond to different types of competition during word comprehension and word production. I will present three studies that attempt to enhance the current understanding of which brain regions are sensitive to different aspects of competition and how the nature of the stimuli and the…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

The inherent confound between the organization of articulation and the acoustic-phonetic structure of the speech signal makes it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the competing claims of motor and acoustic-phonetic accounts of how listeners recognize coarticulated speech. Here we use Granger causation analysis of high spatiotemporal resolution…

Reviews phoneme monitoring studies from 1969 to 1996 and groups them in terms of issues addressed with the task, including the contribution of the lexicon to speech perception, processing complexity, attention, contribution of prosodic information, and the basic unit of speech perception. Identifies and highlights task demands and artifactual…