The phonemic restoration effect reveals pre-N400 effect of supportive sentence context in speech perception

The phonemic restoration effect refers to the tendency for people to hallucinate a phoneme replaced by a non-speech sound (e.g., a tone) in a word. This illusion can be influenced by preceding sentential context providing information about the likelihood of the missing phoneme. The saliency of the illusion suggests that supportive context can affect relatively low (phonemic or lower) levels of speech processing. Indeed, a previous event-related brain potential (ERP) investigation of the phonemic restoration effect found that the processing of coughs replacing high versus low probability phonemes in sentential words differed from each other as early as the auditory N1 (120–180 ms post-stimulus); this result, however, was confounded by physical differences between the high and low probability speech stimuli, thus it could have been caused by factors such as habituation and not by supportive context. We conducted a similar ERP experiment avoiding this confound by using the same auditory stimuli preceded by text that made critical phonemes more or less probable. We too found the robust N400 effect of phoneme/word probability, but did not observe the early N1 effect. We did however observe a left posterior effect of phoneme/word probability around 192–224 ms—clear evidence of a relatively early effect of supportive sentence context in speech comprehension distinct from the N400.

Research Highlights
► Relatively early left posterior ERP correlate of word/phoneme probability discovered.
► To our knowledge, this is the earliest known correlate of word/phoneme probability.
► Such an early effect could support interactive theories of speech comprehension.
► N1 effect of sentence context found in earlier, similar work was not replicated.