Abstract
During difficult tasks, conflict can benefit performance on a subsequent trial. One theory for such performance adjustments is that people monitor for conflict and reactively engage cognitive control. This hypothesis has been challenged because tasks that control for associative learning do not show such “cognitive control” effects. The current study experimentally controlled associative learning by presenting a novel stimulus on every trial of a picture–speech conflict task and found that performance adjustments still occur. Thirty-one healthy young adults listened to and repeated words presented in background noise while viewing pictures that were congruent or incongruent (i.e., phonological neighbors) with the word. Following conflict, participants had higher word recognition (+17% points) on incongruent but not congruent trials. This result was not attributable to posterror effects nor a speed–accuracy trade-off. An analysis of erroneous responses showed that participants made more phonologically related errors than nonrelated errors only on incongruent trials, demonstrating elevated phonological conflict when the picture was a neighbor of the target word. Additionally, postconflict improvements appear to be due to better resolution of phonological conflict in the mental lexicon rather than decreased attention to the picture or increased attention to the speech signal. Our findings provide new evidence for conflict monitoring and suggest that cognitive control helps resolve phonological conflict during speech recognition in noise.
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Data Availability
All data, materials, and code from this study are freely available on the Open Science Framework and can be downloaded at the following link: https://osf.io/gwrk/?view_only=1400919546ad438bb5ea1abe2d839416.
Notes
One subject made no errors in the congruent condition. The results for the other conditions do not change substantively when this subject is excluded, incongruent: M = 0.66, SD = 0.12, t(29) = 7.19, p < .001; filler: M = 0.50, SD = 0.15; t(29) = −0.07, p = .95.
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Author note
This research was supported in part by NIH/NIDCD award R21 DC016375. The content does not necessary represent the views of the NIH. Thanks to Drs. Mark Eckert and Judy Dubno for feedback on the research design; Jayne Ahlstrom for assistance recording stimuli; and Erin Blythe, Amelia Grace Hill, Katie Moore, Stephen Woods, Demi Hester, Jesse Cape, Erica George, Grace Schooley, Savannah Strickland, and Madison Tyler for their assistance with data collection and curation. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
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Teubner-Rhodes, S., Luu, A., Dunterman, R. et al. Evidence for conflict monitoring during speech recognition in noise. Psychon Bull Rev (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02393-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02393-0