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Scientists at the Basque research center BCBL conclude that the voice is fundamental to mentally present the meaning of words in the brain. This discovery implies a better understanding of how sound waves bring additional information to words.
For years, neuroscientists have been trying to determine whether the voice influences the treatment of information or whether we understand a word one way or another depending on the person who utters it.
A study by the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) of San Sebastian now concludes that sound waves effectively transmit information that goes beyond the lexical meaning of words.
This research, published online in the Diary of memory and language, proved that the words contain information indexed by the voice.
Under the direction of Efthymia Kapnoula, the paper determines that the meaning we give to words is conditioned by factors that are not limited to lexical information. People, and especially their voices, have a lot to say about the mental representation of words.
Ten years ago, another study concluded that the speaker had an influence when it was a matter of listening to a sentence. "This experience has shown that if we hear a child say," Every night, I drink some wine before I fall asleep, "our brain is surprised, but it is not the same if it is told by an adult, "says Kapnoula.
However, the BCBL team sought to go further and determine if the additional information provided by the speaker's voice is stored in the interlocutor's brain as part of the lexical representation of the voice of the speaker.
Learning new words
"All the words that a person knows are what we call the mental lexicon, and each of them is considered abstract, in the sense that it contains only linguistic information." of the person who pronounces the word is non-linguistic information and, Until now, it was thought that it was not kept in the mental lexicon ", explains the researcher.
The study paid particular attention to the question of whether cognitive representations of words contain information on the voice of the speaker who pronounces them. Thus, the experience consisted of teaching the participants a series of words they did not know, from different voices.
"During these sessions, we manipulated the frequency with which a word spoken by a specific voice was used to refer to an image.The results showed that new words were activated more quickly when the voice matched the picture. image, "says Kapnoula.
Discovery involves understanding what the mental lexicon is. "Understanding the nature of lexical representations is a prerequisite for any word-related research, as well as for discovering how people learn and treat them," he says.
Kapnoula recognizes that there is still much to study in this area. "One of the possible directions is to investigate whether this effect of the voice is even stronger in children, for whom the mental lexicon develops even more radically," she concludes.
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Bibliographic reference:
Efthymia C. Kapnoula; Arthur G.Samuel. "Voice in the mental lexicon: Words carry indexed information that can affect access to their meaning". Diary of memory and language Volume 107, August 2019, pages 111-127 https: /
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