Learning new words: Implications for speech processing and for lexical memory by James M. McQueen (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
lle et al., 2012; Schwartze & Kotz, 2013). I will discuss new empirical and patient evidence (motor-auditory coupling and auditory only) in support of these considerations and present an extended cortico-subcortical framework encompassing action-perception coupling, perception, and multimodal speech.
ur, Aix-en-Provence LPL
Listeners are able to recognise words in spite of considerable variation in how words are realized physically. For example, Mary may need to recognise an English word spoken by Jacques, a non-native speaker that Mary has never heard before. Evidence from behavioural (eye-tracking) and neuroscientific (EEG and fMRI) studies on novel word learning will be presented which suggests that listeners cope with the variation in spoken words through abstracting away from the episodic details of particular experienced word forms. This process can be seen in on-line speech recognition: the way a novel realization of a new word is processed is based on phonological knowledge previously abstracted from other words. The need for abstraction also shapes lexical memory: sleep-enhanced memory consolidation processes support the transfer of newly-learned words from episodic memory to long-term lexical memory, making generalization across modalities possible. Listeners can recognise, for example, newly-learned words that they have previously read but that they have never heard before.
