Contextual information influences how we perceive speech, but it remains unclear at which level of processing contextual information merges with acoustic information. Theories differ on whether early stages of speech processing, like sublexical processing during which articulatory features and portions of speech sounds are identified, are strictly feed-forward or are influenced by semantic and lexical context. In the current study, we investigate the time-course of lexical context effects on judgments about the individual sounds we perceive by recording electroencephalography as an online measure of speech processing while subjects engage in a lexically biasing phoneme categorization task. We find that lexical context modulates the amplitude of the N100, an ERP component linked with sublexical processes in speech perception. We demonstrate that these results can be modeled in an interactive speech perception model and are not well fit by any established feed-forward mechanisms of lexical bias. These results support interactive speech perception theories over feed-forward theories in which sublexical speech perception processes are only driven by bottom-up information.

中文翻译：

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早期词汇对语音感知中亚词汇处理的影响：来自电生理学的证据。

上下文信息会影响我们对语音的感知方式，但尚不清楚上下文信息与声学信息合并的处理级别。关于语音处理的早期阶段（例如，亚词法处理（在此期间识别语音的发音特征和部分））是否严格前馈还是受语义和词法上下文的影响，理论上存在分歧。在当前的研究中，我们通过记录脑电图作为语音处理的一种在线测量方法，来调查词汇上下文效应对个人声音判断的时程，而受试者则参与了词汇偏向音素的分类任务。我们发现词汇上下文调节了N100的幅度，N100是与语音感知中的次词汇过程相关的ERP组件。我们证明，这些结果可以在交互式语音感知模型中建模，并且不能很好地适合于任何已建立的词汇偏见的前馈机制。这些结果支持交互式语音感知理论，而不是前言理论仅由自下而上的信息驱动的前馈理论。