Word-Monitoring Tasks Interact with Levels of Representation During Speech Comprehension
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2000
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Abstract
Researchers frequently use data from monitoring tasks to argue that constraints on meaning facilitate lower-level processes. An alternate hypothesis is that the processing level that a monitoring task requires interacts with discourse-level processing. Subjects monitored spoken sentences for a synonym (semantic match), a nonsense word (phonological match), or a rhyme (phonologically and semantically constrained matching). The critical targets appeared at the beginning of the final clause in two-clause sentences that began with if, which signals a semantic analysis at the discourse level, or with though, which maintains a surface representation. Synonym-monitoring times were faster for if than for though, nonsense word-monitoring times were faster for though than for if, and rhyme-monitoring times did not differ for if and though. The results show that conjunctions influence how listeners allocate attention to semantic versus phonological information, implying that listeners form these kinds of information independently.
DOI
10.1023/A:1005148104885
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Townsend, David; Hoover, Michael; and Bever, Thomas G., "Word-Monitoring Tasks Interact with Levels of Representation During Speech Comprehension" (2000). Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 588.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/psychology-facpubs/588
Published Citation
Townsend, D.J., Hoover, M. & Bever, T.G. Word-Monitoring Tasks Interact with Levels of Representation During Speech Comprehension. J Psycholinguist Res 29, 265–274 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005148104885
