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Müller's goal of bringing neuroscience to bear on controversies in linguistics is laudable. However, some of his specific proposals about innateness and autonomy are misguided. Recent studies on the neurobiology of regular and... more
Müller's goal of bringing neuroscience to bear on controversies in linguistics is laudable. However, some of his specific proposals about innateness and autonomy are misguided. Recent studies on the neurobiology of regular and irregular inflectional morphology indicate that these two linguistic processes are subserved by anatomically and physiologically distinct neural subsystems, whose functional organization is likely to be under direct genetic control rather than assembled by strictly epigenetic factors.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Body, and 15 moreCognitive Neuropsychology, Brain Mapping, Humans, Anomia, Human Body, Comprehension, Concept Formation, Female, Aged, Adult, Functional Neuroimaging, Body Parts, Brain Damage, Case Control Studies, and Functional Laterality
Research Interests: Neurology, Biology, Linguistics, Language, Medicine, and 15 moreBrain Mapping, Humans, Action, Animals, Mirror Neuron System, Mirror Neuron, Motor Cortex, Neurons, Premotor cortex, Boolean Satisfiability, Primary Motor Cortex, Motor activity, Haplorhini, Medical and Health Sciences, and Brodmann area
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ABSTRACT Language is one of our most precious and uniquely human capacities, so it is not surprising that research on its neural substrates has been advancing quite rapidly in recent years. Until now, however, there has not been a single... more
ABSTRACT Language is one of our most precious and uniquely human capacities, so it is not surprising that research on its neural substrates has been advancing quite rapidly in recent years. Until now, however, there has not been a single introductory textbook that focuses specifically on this topic. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language fills that gap by providing an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and pedagogically practical survey of the most important developments in the field. It guides students through all of the major areas of investigation, beginning with fundamental aspects of brain structure and function, and then proceeding to cover aphasia syndromes, the perception and production of speech, the processing of language in written and signed modalities, the meanings of words, and the formulation and comprehension of complex expressions, including grammatically inflected words, complete sentences, and entire stories. Drawing heavily on prominent theoretical models, the core chapters illustrate how such frameworks are supported, and sometimes challenged, by experiments employing diverse brain mapping techniques. Although much of the content is inherently challenging and intended primarily for graduate or upper-level undergraduate students, it requires no previous knowledge of either neuroscience or linguistics, defining technical terms and explaining important principles from both disciplines along the way. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/184872621X/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me= http://www.guilfordpress.co.uk/books/details/9781848726215/
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ABSTRACT Adopting a broad cognitive neuroscience perspective, this chapter addresses the idiosyncratic root-level semantic components of action verbs, focusing specifically on visual and motor features. Two hypotheses are considered:... more
ABSTRACT Adopting a broad cognitive neuroscience perspective, this chapter addresses the idiosyncratic root-level semantic components of action verbs, focusing specifically on visual and motor features. Two hypotheses are considered: first, the visual motion patterns encoded by action verbs depend on the left posterolateral temporal cortex; and second, the body-part-specific motor patterns encoded by action verbs depend on the left premotor and primary motor cortex. Recent findings supporting both hypotheses are drawn from studies employing diverse brain mapping techniques. In addition, several issues requiring further research are identified and discussed.
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According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that... more
According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that these concrete conceptual features reuse some of the same modality‐specific representations that serve to categorize experiences involving the relevant kinds of objects and events. Research in semantic typology, however, has shown that word meanings vary significantly across the roughly 6500 languages in the world. I argue that this crosslinguistic semantic diversity has significant yet previously unrecognized theoretical consequences for the GCM. In particular, to accommodate the typological data, the GCM must assume that the concrete features of word meanings are not merely stored within sensory/motor brain systems, but are represented there in ways that are, to a nontrivial degree, language‐specific. Moreover, it must assume that these conceptual representations are also activated during the nonlinguistic processing of the relevant kinds of objects and events (e.g., during visual perception and action planning); otherwise, they would not really be grounded, which is to say, embedded inside sensory/motor systems. Crucially, however, such activations would constitute what is traditionally called linguistic relativity—that is, the influence of language‐specific semantic structures on other forms of cognition. The overarching aim of this paper is to elaborate this argument more fully and explore its repercussions. To that end, I discuss in greater detail the key aspects of the GCM, the evidence for crosslinguistic semantic diversity, pertinent work on linguistic relativity, the central claim that the GCM entails linguistic relativity, some initial supporting results, and some important limitations and future directions.
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This chapter reviews recent empirical and theoretical research on the cortical underpinnings of grammatical categories. It draws on data from multiple brain mapping methods, but it places special emphasis on a topic that has been quite... more
This chapter reviews recent empirical and theoretical research on the cortical underpinnings of grammatical categories. It draws on data from multiple brain mapping methods, but it places special emphasis on a topic that has been quite prominent in this branch of neurolinguistics, namely the noun-verb distinction. This distinction is addressed from five perspectives: (1) studies that focus on the meanings of prototypical object nouns and action verbs; (2) studies that report brain-damaged patients with word production impairments that selectively or disproportionately affect not only a particular grammatical category (nouns/verbs), but also a particular output channel (speaking/writing); (3) studies that attempt to overcome confounds between conceptual and grammatical factors, either by closely matching the meanings of nouns and verbs, or by investigating both concrete and abstract nouns and verbs; (4) studies that concentrate on the different inflectional processes associated with ...
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This final chapter addresses the following question: Do the highest levels of mental representation—in particular, concepts and the thoughts they enter into—ever achieve consciousness when activated? Two competing positions have been... more
This final chapter addresses the following question: Do the highest levels of mental representation—in particular, concepts and the thoughts they enter into—ever achieve consciousness when activated? Two competing positions have been taken on this issue. The liberal view holds that the contents of experience include not only sensory, motor, and affective states, but also whatever concepts happen to be engaged. In contrast, the conservative view maintains that concepts lack intrinsic qualia and always perform their functions beneath the surface of awareness. This chapter argues that the conservative view is more plausible than the liberal view, and that this has significant implications for three contemporary neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Specifically, it shows that the conservative view raises serious problems for Stanislas Dehaene’s Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, but is consistent with Jesse Prinz’s Attended Intermed...
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It is tempting to suppose that all languages represent objects in comparable ways. Typological research has shown, however, that while there are many cross-linguistic similarities in this semantic realm, there are also numerous... more
It is tempting to suppose that all languages represent objects in comparable ways. Typological research has shown, however, that while there are many cross-linguistic similarities in this semantic realm, there are also numerous differences. This chapter describes some of these findings and explores their implications for cognitive neuroscience. The first section discusses plant, animal, and artifact concepts jointly, but in a manner that still respects their different treatments by typologists and neuroscientists. Then the subsequent section focuses on a fourth domain, namely body parts. Next, the chapter considers some of the ways in which objects are represented by the following kinds of closed-class items and constructions: grammatical-semantic splits involving possession, and nominal classification systems. Although both of these forms of object representation have been intensively investigated in typology, they have been almost completely neglected in neuroscience; hence, they ...
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Among the many lines of research that have been exploring how embodiment contributes to cognition, one focuses on how the neural substrates of language may be shared, or at least closely coupled, with those of action. This paper revisits... more
Among the many lines of research that have been exploring how embodiment contributes to cognition, one focuses on how the neural substrates of language may be shared, or at least closely coupled, with those of action. This paper revisits a particular proposal that has received considerable attention—namely, that the forms of hierarchical sequencing that characterize both linguistic syntax and goal-directed action are underpinned partly by common mechanisms in left Brodmann area (BA) 44, a cortical region that is not only classically regarded as part of Broca’s area, but is also a core component of the human Mirror Neuron System. First, a recent multi-participant, multi-round debate about this proposal is summarized together with some other relevant findings. This review reveals that while the proposal is supported by a variety of theoretical arguments and empirical results, it still faces several challenges. Next, a narrower application of the proposal is discussed, specifically inv...
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2 The major semantic properties of action verbs and argument structure constructions are summarized using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. This sets the stage for an analysis of the neuroanatomical substrates of action... more
2 The major semantic properties of action verbs and argument structure constructions are summarized using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. This sets the stage for an analysis of the neuroanatomical substrates of action verbs and argument structure constructions in support of the hypothesis that the linguistic representation of action is grounded in the mirror neuron system. The discussion is then broadened to consider the emergence of language during ontogeny and phylogeny.
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ABSTRACT Research on how categories of object concepts are implemented in the human brain has focused primarily on the sorts of semantic structures that are found in English and a few other European languages. This paper provides a... more
ABSTRACT Research on how categories of object concepts are implemented in the human brain has focused primarily on the sorts of semantic structures that are found in English and a few other European languages. This paper provides a broader typological perspective by considering the multifarious categories of object concepts that are encoded by languages with nominal classification systems. In these languages, speakers must explicitly categorize objects at both basic and superordinate levels – indicating, for instance, that a particular entity is not just a pencil but an elongated thing. The following semantic parameters of nominal classification systems are discussed: animacy and related properties, shape and related properties, size, constitution, and interaction/function. For each parameter, cross-linguistically frequent and infrequent semantic distinctions are surveyed first, and then their relevance to cognitive neuroscience is considered. These analyses strongly suggest that the neural underpinnings of object concepts are influenced by both universal tendencies and cultural idiosyncrasies.
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People can conceptualize the same action (e.g. 'riding a bike') at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.g. 'getting exercise'),... more
People can conceptualize the same action (e.g. 'riding a bike') at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.g. 'getting exercise'), while lower LOAs specify the concrete steps that indicate how the action is performed (e.g. 'gripping handlebars'). Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that why and how questions about actions differentially activate two cortical networks associated with mental-state reasoning and action representation, respectively; however, it remains unknown whether this is due to the differential demands of the questions per se or to the shifts in LOA those questions produce. We conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants judged pairs of action phrases that varied in LOA and that could be framed either as a why question (Why ride a bike? Get exercise.) or a how question (How to get exercise? Ride a bike.). Question framing (why vs...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Social Cognition, Semantic Memory, Abstraction, and 11 moreConcepts, Medicine, FMRI, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Construal Level Theory, Understanding of Action, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Action Understanding, Action Identification Theory, Neurosciences, and Representation Politics
Seeing an agent perform an action typically triggers a motor simulation of that action in the observer's Mirror Neuron System (MNS). Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that during action observation the patterns... more
Seeing an agent perform an action typically triggers a motor simulation of that action in the observer's Mirror Neuron System (MNS). Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that during action observation the patterns and strengths of responses in the MNS are modulated by multiple factors. The first aim of this paper is therefore to provide the most comprehensive survey to date of these factors. To that end, 22 distinct factors are described, broken down into the following sets: six involving the action; two involving the actor; nine involving the observer; four involving the relationship between actor and observer; and one involving the context. The second aim is to consider the implications of these findings for four prominent theoretical models of the MNS: the Direct Matching Model; the Predictive Coding Model; the Value-Driven Model; and the Associative Model. These assessments suggest that although each model is supported by a wide range of findings, each one is also challenged by other findings and relatively unaffected by still others. Hence, there is now a pressing need for a richer, more inclusive model that is better able to account for all of the modulatory factors that have been identified so far.
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For most native English speakers, the meanings of words like “blue,” “cup,” “stumble,” and “carve” seem quite natural. Research in semantic typology has shown, however, that they are far from universal. Although the roughly 6,500... more
For most native English speakers, the meanings of words like “blue,” “cup,” “stumble,” and “carve” seem quite natural. Research in semantic typology has shown, however, that they are far from universal. Although the roughly 6,500 languages around the world have many similarities in the sorts of concepts they encode, they also vary greatly in how they partition particular conceptual domains, how they map those domains onto syntactic categories, which distinctions they force speakers to habitually track, and how deeply they weave certain notions into the fabric of their grammar. Although these insights from semantic typology have had a major impact on psycholinguistics, they have mostly been neglected by the branch of cognitive neuroscience that studies how concepts are represented, organized, and processed in the brain. In this book, David Kemmerer exposes this oversight and demonstrates its significance. He argues that as research on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge moves...
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Ever since the 1980s, research on the cross-linguistic representation of spatial relations has burgeoned. Surprisingly, however, very little of this work has had any impact on cognitive neuroscience, and most researchers who study the... more
Ever since the 1980s, research on the cross-linguistic representation of spatial relations has burgeoned. Surprisingly, however, very little of this work has had any impact on cognitive neuroscience, and most researchers who study the cortical underpinnings of concrete conceptual knowledge have ignored spatial relations completely, preferring to focus on objects and actions instead. Due to this rather stark asymmetry, this chapter has a different organization than the previous two. The first section focuses entirely on cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the grammatical-semantic representation of three main types of spatial relations: topological, projective, and deictic. Then the last section addresses a number of neuroscientific issues, including a review of what has been learned so far about the implementation of these kinds of concepts in the brain, and a discussion of how the typological literature can both inspire and guide future research in this important but re...
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This chapter addresses the following question: How do language-specific concepts relate to cognition? The interaction between language and thought has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike for centuries, but during the past few decades... more
This chapter addresses the following question: How do language-specific concepts relate to cognition? The interaction between language and thought has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike for centuries, but during the past few decades this complex topic has gained significance from the discovery that, as shown in Part II, the amount of cross-linguistic diversity in both lexical and grammatical semantics is much greater than previously assumed. The first two sections draw upon psychological and neuroscientific studies to support two seemingly contradictory but actually complementary claims: many forms of cognition do not depend on language-specific concepts; nonetheless, such concepts do sometimes influence a variety of cognitive processes, in keeping with Whorf’s (1956) linguistic relativity hypothesis (or at least with a weak version of it). The last section then addresses some interpretive issues regarding recent neuroscientific evidence that some verbal and nonverbal semantic ...
ABSTRACT When Levelt’s pioneering book about the Lemma Model of speech production appeared in 1989, cognitive neuroscience was just starting to take off. During the 30 years since then, this influential framework has undergone many... more
ABSTRACT When Levelt’s pioneering book about the Lemma Model of speech production appeared in 1989, cognitive neuroscience was just starting to take off. During the 30 years since then, this influential framework has undergone many refinements, and extensive efforts have been made to relate it to the brain. This paper provides a broad overview of these developments. The first section briefly describes the main claims of the theory. Then the next section presents multiple forms of evidence that, in keeping with these claims, spoken word generation depends on a predominantly left-hemisphere circuit in which the different levels of representation and computation postulated by the theory are subserved by mostly non-overlapping cortical regions, and the flow of information between them is largely sequential. Finally, the last section focuses on a number of other findings from cognitive neuroscience that appear to challenge the theory and hence must be addressed in future research.
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Abstract There are nearly 6,500 languages in the world, and they vary greatly with regard to both lexical and grammatical semantics. Hence, an early stage of utterance planning involves "thinking for speaking"—i.e., shaping the... more
Abstract There are nearly 6,500 languages in the world, and they vary greatly with regard to both lexical and grammatical semantics. Hence, an early stage of utterance planning involves "thinking for speaking"—i.e., shaping the thoughts to be expressed so they fit the idiosyncratic meanings of the symbolic units that happen to be available in the target language. This paper has three main sections that cover three distinct types of crosslinguistic semantic diversity. Each type is initially elaborated with examples, and then its implications for the neurobiology of speech production are considered. Type 1: Semantic field partitions. These are exemplified by huge crosslinguistic differences in many domains of meaning, including colors, body parts, household containers, events of cutting and breaking, and topological spatial relations. When such differences are viewed from the perspective of contemporary neurocognitive theories which assume that most concrete concepts are subserved by both modal (i.e., sensory, motor, and affective) and transmodal (i.e., integrative) cortical systems, they imply that speakers must access language-specific semantic structures at multiple levels of representation in the brain. Type 2: Semantic conflation classes. Some languages have whole sets of words that systematically encode two or more components of meaning. For instance, in the roughly 53 Athabaskan languages there are no generic verbs like give, carry, or throw; instead, there are entire sets of 9–13 verbs for these kinds of actions, with each set making the same distinctions between the types of objects that are given, carried, or thrown, such as animate objects, round objects, stick-like objects, flat objects, etc. This regular conflation of [action + object] in Athabaskan verb meanings predicts that speakers frequently co-activate both action-related and object-related cortical regions in a functionally integrated fashion. Type 3: Grammatically obligatory semantic categories. This kind of crosslinguistic variation involves not only the particular dimensions of experience that speakers are forced to track for grammatical purposes, but also the precise contrasts that they must make along those dimensions, with examples including systems of nominal classification, tense, and evidentiality. It is still not known exactly where or how the meanings of grammatically necessary closed-class morphemes are implemented in the brain, but it is quite clear that whatever the neural substrates of these meanings turn out to be, they are strongly influenced by crosslinguistic differences. In all, by focusing on three separate forms of crosslinguistic semantic diversity, this paper reinforces Levelt's (1989) point that "messages must be tuned to the target language," and it also shows that this point continues to have significant consequences for neurolinguistic research on speech production.
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Grounded cognition explanations of metaphor comprehension predict activation of sensorimotor cortices relevant to the metaphor's source domain. We tested this prediction for body-part metaphors using functional magnetic resonance... more
Grounded cognition explanations of metaphor comprehension predict activation of sensorimotor cortices relevant to the metaphor's source domain. We tested this prediction for body-part metaphors using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants heard sentences containing metaphorical or literal references to body parts, and comparable control sentences. Localizer scans identified body-part-specific motor, somatosensory and visual cortical regions. Both subject- and item-wise analyses showed that, relative to control sentences, metaphorical but not literal sentences evoked limb metaphor-specific activity in the left extrastriate body area (EBA), paralleling the EBA's known visual limb-selectivity. The EBA focus exhibited resting-state functional connectivity with ipsilateral semantic processing regions. In some of these regions, the strength of resting-state connectivity correlated with individual preference for verbal processing. Effective connectivity analyses s...
Research Interests: Psychology, Semantics, Cognition, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Metaphor, and 15 moreLanguage, Medicine, Brain Mapping, Humans, Human Body, Comprehension, Female, Male, Motor Cortex, Somatosensory Cortex, Adult, Extremities, photic stimulation, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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We assess the challenges of studying action and language mechanisms in the brain, both singly and in relation to each other to provide a novel perspective on neuroinformatics, integrating the development of databases for encoding –... more
We assess the challenges of studying action and language mechanisms in the brain, both singly and in relation to each other to provide a novel perspective on neuroinformatics, integrating the development of databases for encoding – separately or together – neurocomputational models and empirical data that serve systems and cognitive neuroscience.
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With the aim of exploring some connections between semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience, this paper focuses on the following simple but provocative argument: (i) Premise 1 (from semantic typology): Concrete word meanings vary... more
With the aim of exploring some connections between semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience, this paper focuses on the following simple but provocative argument: (i) Premise 1 (from semantic typology): Concrete word meanings vary greatly across languages. (ii) Premise 2 (from cognitive neuroscience): Concrete word meanings are, to a large extent, grounded in sensory and motor brain systems. (iii) Inference: The high-level representations in one’s sensory and motor brain systems are shaped, in part, by the typologically unique lexical-semantic properties of one’s language.
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The neural correlates of conceptual knowledge for actions are not well understood. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we tested the hypothesis that the retrieval of conceptual knowledge for actions depends on neural systems located... more
The neural correlates of conceptual knowledge for actions are not well understood. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we tested the hypothesis that the retrieval of conceptual knowledge for actions depends on neural systems located in higher-order association cortices of left premotor/prefrontal, parietal, and posterior middle temporal regions. The investigation used the lesion method and involved 90 subjects with damage to various regions of the left or right hemisphere. The experimental tasks measured retrieval of knowledge for actions, in a nonverbal format: Subjects evaluated attributes of pictured actions, and compared and matched pictures of actions. In support of our hypothesis, we found that the regions of highest lesion overlap in subjects with impaired retrieval of conceptual knowledge for actions were in the left premotor/prefrontal sector, the left parietal region, and in the white matter underneath the left posterior middle temporal region. These sites are partially distinct from those identified previously as being important for the retrieval of words for actions. We propose that a key function of the sites is to operate as two-way intermediaries between perception and concept retrieval, to promote the retrieval of the multidimensional aspects of knowledge that are necessary and sufficient for the mental representation of a concept of a given action.
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Two experiments using bisyllabic CVCCVC nonsense words that varied in phonotactic probability and stress placement were conducted to examine the influences of phonotactic and metrical information on spoken word recognition. Experiment 1... more
Two experiments using bisyllabic CVCCVC nonsense words that varied in phonotactic probability and stress placement were conducted to examine the influences of phonotactic and metrical information on spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 examined participants' intuitions about the phonological "goodness" of nonsense words. Experiment 2 examined processing times for the same stimuli in a speeded auditory repetition task. The results of both studies provide further evidence that the phonotactic configuration and stress placement of spoken stimuli have important implications for the representation and processing of spoken words.
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Two experiments using bisyllabic CVCCVC nonsense words that varied in phonotactic probability and stress placement were conducted to examine the influences of phonotactic and metrical information on spoken word recognition. Experiment 1... more
Two experiments using bisyllabic CVCCVC nonsense words that varied in phonotactic probability and stress placement were conducted to examine the influences of phonotactic and metrical information on spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 examined participants' intuitions about the phonological "goodness" of nonsense words. Experiment 2 examined processing times for the same stimuli in a speeded auditory repetition task. The results of both studies provide further evidence that the phonotactic configuration and stress placement of spoken stimuli have important implications for the representation and processing of spoken words.