Auditory associative word learning in adults: the effects of musical experience and stimulus ordering

Abstract

Evidence for sequential associative word learning in the auditory domain has been identified in infants, but adults have proven to have difficulties in this type of word learning. To investigate the role of auditory expertise and auditory stimuli salience in the association of auditory objects and their labels, we tested in the first experiment auditorily-trained musicians versus athletes as a high-level control group and in the second experiment stimulus ordering, contrasting object-label versus label-object presentation. Learning was evaluated from electrophysiological (EEG) recordings during training and subsequent testing phases, as well as accuracy-judgement responses during test. Results revealed for musicians a late positive component in the EEG during testing, neither N400 nor behavioral effects were found at test, while athletes did not show any effect of learning. Moreover, the object-label-ordering group only exhibited emerging association effects during training, while the label-object-ordering group showed an EEG effect during test as well as above chance accuracy-judgement scores. Thus, our results suggest an advantage of musical expertise and more salient label-object-ordering in auditory associative word learning in adults. Implications with respect to developmental differences in auditory word learning are discussed.