University of Tübingen, Developmental Psychology, Germany.
University of Tübingen, Developmental Psychology, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Apr;112:116-124. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.002. Epub 2018 Mar 7.
It is a matter of debate, whether and how improved auditory discrimination abilities enable speeded speech comprehension in congenitally blind adults. Previous research has concentrated on semantic and syntactic aspects of processing. Here we investigated phonologically mediated spoken word access processes by means of word onset priming. Blind adults and age- and gender-matched sighted adults listened to spoken word onsets (primes) followed by complete words (targets). Phonological overlap between primes and targets varied. Blind participants made faster lexical decision responses than sighted participants, yet their speeded responses were not restricted to phonologically overlapping trials. Furthermore, timing of Event Related Potential (ERP) results did not differ between blind and sighted participants. Together these results suggest that blind and sighted listeners are equally fast in implicit phonological encoding and lexical matching mechanisms. It appears that blind adults' speeded speech processing emerges when phonological analysis makes promising word candidates available for further processing. As one possible interpretation, we speculate that lexical selection processes in blind adults do not need to wait for information from the visual domain, while auditory-visual integration mechanisms are mandatorily implemented in speech recognition routines of sighted adults.
先天性盲人的听觉辨别能力是否以及如何提高言语理解速度仍存在争议。之前的研究主要集中在处理的语义和句法方面。在这里，我们通过词首启动研究了语音介导的口语词汇获取过程。盲人和年龄、性别匹配的视力正常成年人听单词开头（启动），然后是完整的单词（目标）。启动和目标之间的语音重叠程度不同。盲参与者比视力正常参与者做出更快的词汇判断反应，但他们的快速反应并不仅限于语音重叠试验。此外，事件相关电位（ERP）结果的时间在盲人和视力正常参与者之间没有差异。这些结果表明，盲人和视力正常的听众在隐式语音编码和词汇匹配机制方面同样快速。当语音分析提供有希望的单词候选词供进一步处理时，似乎盲成年人的快速言语处理就会出现。我们推测，作为一种可能的解释，盲成年人的词汇选择过程不需要等待来自视觉领域的信息，而听觉-视觉整合机制在视力正常成年人的语音识别例程中是强制性实施的。
