Contextual Constraints On The Activation Of Lexical Forms By Nonlinguistic Sounds

Three visual world experiments investigated the activation of linguistic knowledge during the processing of nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants heard spoken words such as "car" or environmental sounds such as a sound produced by a car while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a car (target), card (phonologically related competitor), and box (unrelated distractor). Interleaved throughout, participants heard both spoken words and environmental sounds. In Experiments 2 and 3, to assess contextual constraints on processing, participants only heard environmental sounds while viewing similar visual arrays (targets were included in the former but not the latter). When participants heard environmental sounds interleaved among spoken words (Experiment 1), they fixated competitors significantly more than distractors during both types of auditory stimuli, suggesting that both engage linguistic systems and representations; however, when participants only heard environmental sounds (Experiments 2 and 3), phonological competition was not observed. These results suggest that the activation of linguistic knowledge by environmental sounds is context dependent rather than automatic, differing from spoken words. Implications for theories addressing the mapping of auditory stimuli onto conceptual knowledge are discussed.Public Significance StatementEnvironmental sounds are nonlinguistic sounds that are produced by everyday entities and events, such as the sounds produced by planes, trains, and automobiles. Focusing on the retrieval of linguistic information, this study highlights both similarities and differences between the processing of language and environmental sounds.