TY - JOUR
T1 - Is imagining a voice like listening to it? Evidence from ERPs
AU - Zhou, Peiyun
AU - Garnsey, Susan
AU - Christianson, Kiel
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the Beckman Institute Language and Brain Lab members, Keqi Wei, Young Jae Lee, Laeh Ragans, Shaolingyun Guo for their valuable help in collecting data. The project was funded by the research grant awarded to Kiel Christianson and Peiyun Zhou from the Confucius Institute at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States as well as a University of Illinois Graduate Dissertation Fellowship and a Beckman Graduate Fellowship to Peiyun Zhou.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Readers who have seen the Harry Potter movies before reading the novels may “hear” actors’ voices in their heads when they later read the books. This phenomenon of mentally simulating the voice of speakers depicted in texts has been referred to as auditory perceptual simulation (APS). How much is this mental simulation of voices like listening to actual voices? Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined the auditory perceptual simulation of native and non-native English speech while participants silently read English sentences containing subject-verb agreement errors or pronoun-case errors. The aim was to compare readers’ ERPs when imagining native and non-native speech to the results of Hanulíková van Alphen, van Goch, and Weber (2012), who recorded ERPs while participants listened to native and non-native speech and found that native-speaking listeners “forgive” errors (signaled by reduced P600 effects) by non-native speakers. Our participants listened to samples of a native and a non-native English speaker's speech and were then asked to imagine the voice of either one or the other speaker while reading sentences. Results revealed differences in N400 and P600 waveforms when imagining the non-native speaker's voice compared to the native speaker's voice. Importantly, when imagining the non-native speaker committing subject-verb agreement errors, P600 amplitudes were no different from error-free items.
AB - Readers who have seen the Harry Potter movies before reading the novels may “hear” actors’ voices in their heads when they later read the books. This phenomenon of mentally simulating the voice of speakers depicted in texts has been referred to as auditory perceptual simulation (APS). How much is this mental simulation of voices like listening to actual voices? Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined the auditory perceptual simulation of native and non-native English speech while participants silently read English sentences containing subject-verb agreement errors or pronoun-case errors. The aim was to compare readers’ ERPs when imagining native and non-native speech to the results of Hanulíková van Alphen, van Goch, and Weber (2012), who recorded ERPs while participants listened to native and non-native speech and found that native-speaking listeners “forgive” errors (signaled by reduced P600 effects) by non-native speakers. Our participants listened to samples of a native and a non-native English speaker's speech and were then asked to imagine the voice of either one or the other speaker while reading sentences. Results revealed differences in N400 and P600 waveforms when imagining the non-native speaker's voice compared to the native speaker's voice. Importantly, when imagining the non-native speaker committing subject-verb agreement errors, P600 amplitudes were no different from error-free items.
KW - Auditory perceptual simulation
KW - Event-related potentials
KW - Grammaticality
KW - P600
KW - Sentence processing
KW - Subject-verb disagreement
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.10.014
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.10.014
M3 - Article
C2 - 30366220
AN - SCOPUS:85055142985
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 182
SP - 227
EP - 241
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
ER -