Neural and psychological correlates of phonological categories

Project summary

Understanding language results from a very efficient decoding of the speech signal along the auditory pathway to associative structures in long-term memory. The path between sound and meaning is mediated by different types of representation. Some of these code gradient information from speech input (phonetic representations), some are discrete and abstract, such as phonemic categories, onto which speech also must be mapped. In this project, we study the role of such categories, as well as on sub-phonemic information, in mediating between the speech input and word-form representations in lexical memory. We investigate the nature of these categories by means of behavioural measures, EEG and MEG. The focus is on phonemic and syllabic categories. We probe by means of which input (sub)phonemic and syllabic representations are activated, how robust they are with respect to frequent variations, for example those resulting from assimilation. At the subphonemic level, we test the neural correlates of distinctive features such as place or manner of articulation, both with purely acoustic as with audio-visual stimuli. We aim at a better understanding of the nature of (sub)phonemic and syllabic representations as they mediate between speech input and the mental lexicon, as well as of their neural basis.