On the 4th of December Dr. Amie Fairs (Université Aix-Marseille & CNRS Laboratoire Parole et Langage) will give a visitors talk.

Title:
How much of word production and perception is shared? Similarities in ‘when’ (and ‘where’) linguistic representations are active

Abstract:
One current debate in word production and perception concerns when different linguistic representations are accessed. One group of models – sequential models – argue for sequentiality in word representations, such that upstream effects (such as those relating to word meaning in production) will arise prior to downstream effects (such as those relating to word sounds in production, and vice versa in perception). In contrast, another group of models – integration models – argue for near-simultaneous activation of representations, where, for example, effects relating to meaning and sound would arise in parallel. In order to test these two theories, participants carried out a production and perception task while their EEG was recorded. Both tasks used the same stimuli, and these stimuli varied by word and phonotactic frequency (targeting meaning and sound levels, respectively). Using linear mixed effects models to analyse the EEG signal, we found both word and phonotactic frequency effects arising in early time windows, supporting predictions made by integration models. This suggests that during word production and perception, representations relating to both meaning and sound are active in parallel early in processing. A question which follows from this is whether the same representations are used in both production and perception, or whether there are modality-specific representations which merely follow a similar time course. I will describe our plans to test this in an MRI-constrained MEG experiment, and briefly discuss future experimental designs to further delve into what is shared between production and perception.