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The neurobiology of phonological interference and facilitation effects in spoken production
Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Lydia Z. Huang1, Katie L. McMahon2,3, Greig I. de Zubicaray1, Angelique Volfart1; 1School of Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology, 2Herston Imaging Research Facility, Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital, 3School of Clinical Sciences, Centre for Biomedical Technologies, Queensland University of Technology
Phonological interference (slower reaction times) and facilitation (faster reaction times) effects in spoken word production have been reported in the literature; however, their neural mechanisms are yet to be properly studied. While no neuroimaging studies have investigated the interference effect, those that studied the facilitation effect have reported highly heterogeneous activation patterns, and over half of them failed to observe a behavioural effect (see Arrigoni et al., 2024; de Zubicaray & Piai, 2019). Together, a paradigm that robustly elicits both the interference and facilitation effects in the scanner is needed to understand the neural bases of these effects in language production. We will conduct 2 fMRI experiments using the blocked cyclic naming paradigm to investigate both effect types. Imaging will be performed on a 3T PRISMA system (Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen) at Herston Imaging Research Facility. Participants (N = 24) will attend 2 sessions (3-4 days apart) and task order (interference or facilitation) will be counterbalanced across participants. Each task will use a different stimulus set containing 36 pictures with monosyllabic names, organized into a 6-by-6 matrix. Each row represents homogeneous blocks (i.e., sharing phonemes) and each column represents heterogeneous blocks. The block order (homogeneous or heterogeneous) will be counterbalanced across participants using Latin Square design. Each block, participants will name the 6 pictures 6 times in a different order as quickly as possible. For the interference task, each homogeneous block will contain pictures with distributed phonemic overlap (e.g., cat mat cot cap map mop, same as Breining et al., 2016). For the facilitation task, the phonemic overlap will be at the same position within the word (e.g., moth mug moon mask match maze). The heterogenous block in both tasks will consist of pictures with no phonological, semantic, or visual relationship. Before each task, participants will be familiarized with the pictures. The activation patterns associated with each effect will be extracted by contrasting homogeneous with heterogeneous blocks, and the areas correlating with behavioural changes will be highlighted. The activation patterns of the two experiments will be contrasted to show brain activity specific to each effect type (interference or facilitation). We hypothesize that typical production-related brain areas will be activated in both experiments, including, for example, the left middle temporal gyrus, left posterior superior temporal gyrus (LpSTG), left supramarginal gyrus (LSMG), left inferior frontal gyrus, and bilateral sensorimotor cortices. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the LSMG will be associated with the interference effect, considering its role in speech repetition and sequencing (Hickok et al., 2023), and that the LpSTG will be correlated with the facilitation effect based on previous fMRI studies (de Zubicaray & McMahon, 2009). The results of our study will reveal the neural mechanisms of phonological interference and facilitation effects, which is crucial for understanding the functional roles of the brain areas involved in output phonological processes.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Phonology