The role of inhibitory control in spoken word recognition: Evidence from cochlear implant users

During word recognition, listeners must quickly map sounds to meaning, while suppressing similar sounding competitors. It remains an open question whether domain-general inhibitory control is recruited for resolving lexical competition. Cochlear implant (CI) users present a unique population for addressing this question because they are consistently confronted with degraded auditory input, and therefore may need to rely on domain-general mechanisms to compensate. We examined spoken word recognition in adult CI users who were prelingually deaf (were born deaf or lost their hearing in childhood, N=21), postlingually deaf (lost their hearing in adulthood, N=50), and normal hearing controls (NH; N=71). Participants recognized spoken words while their eyes were tracked and completed an inhibitory control task. CI users were slower to recognize words and did not resolve competition as fully as NH controls. Better inhibitory control predicted faster word activation in NH controls and postlingual, but not prelingual, CI users. Prolonged experience with acoustic language may thus influence how domain-general mechanisms are recruited for language processing.