The (in)dependence of articulation and lexical planning during isolated word production (original) (raw)

Reconciling phonological neighborhood effects in speech production through single trial analysis

Cognitive Psychology, 2014

A crucial step for understanding how lexical knowledge is represented is to describe the relative similarity of lexical items, and how it influences language processing. Previous studies of the effects of form similarity on word production have reported conflicting results, notably within and across languages. The aim of the present study was to clarify this empirical issue to provide specific constraints for theoretical models of language production. We investigated the role of phonological neighborhood density in a large-scale picture naming experiment using finegrained statistical models. The results showed that increasing phonological neighborhood density has a detrimental effect on naming latencies, and re-analyses of independently obtained data sets provide supplementary evidence for this effect. Finally, we reviewed a large body of evidence concerning phonological neighborhood density effects in word production, and discussed the occurrence of facilitatory and inhibitory effects in accuracy measures. The overall pattern shows that phonological neighborhood generates two opposite forces, one facilitatory and one inhibitory. In cases where speech production is disrupted (e.g. certain aphasic symptoms), the facilitatory component may emerge, but inhibitory processes dominate in efficient naming by healthy speakers. These findings are difficult to accommodate in terms of monitoring processes, but can be explained within interactive activation accounts combining phonological facilitation and lexical competition.

Planning at the Phonological Level during Sentence Production

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2006

In two picture-word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short: determiner + noun + verb or long: determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response times to begin producing both types of sentences were faster in the presence of a related versus unrelated distractor. The results suggest that the activation of phonological properties of words outside the first phrase and first and second phonological word affect onset of articulation during sentence production. The results are discussed in the light of previous evidence of phonological planning during multi-word production. Implications for the phonological facilitation effect in the picture-word interference paradigm are also discussed.

Phonological Neighborhood Density in Native and Non-Native Word Production

2009

The role of phonological neighborhood density in lexical access was examined during native-and nonnative language production. German-English and English-German bilinguals named pictures of German words with high-and low-density neighborhoods. Results revealed that accuracy of picture naming was influenced by phonological neighborhood, with high-density neighborhoods facilitating lexical access in both the native and the non-native languages. However, latency of picture naming was facilitated by high-density phonological neighborhoods only in the non-native, but not the native, language. This suggests that native / nonnative language status mediates the effect of phonological neighborhood on the speed of lexical access. Implications for native and non-native language processing dynamics are discussed.

The Time Course of Lexical Access in Speech Production: A Study of Picture Naming

Psychological Review, 1991

Lexical access in object naming involves the activation of a set oflexical candidates, the selection of the appropriate (or target) item, and the phonological encoding of that item. Two views of lexical access in naming are compared. From one view, the 2-stage theory, phonological activation follows selection of the target item and is restricted to that item. From the other view, which is most explicit in activation-spreading theories, all activated lexical candidates are phonologically activated to some extent. A series of experiments is reported in which subjects performed acoustic lexical decision during object naming at different stimulus-onset asynchronies. The experiments show semantic activation of lexical candidates and phonological activation of the target item, but no phonological activation of other semantically activated items. This supports the 2-stage view. Moreover, a mathematical model embodying the 2-stage view is fully compatible with the lexical decision data obtained at different stimulus-onset asynchronies.

Interactions between lexical access and articulation

Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 2018

This study investigates the interaction of lexical access and articulation in spoken word production, examining two dimensions along which theories vary. First, does articulatory variation reflect a fixed plan, or do lexical access-articulatory interactions continue after response initiation? Second, to what extent are interactive mechanisms hard-wired properties of the production system, as opposed to flexible? In two picture naming experiments, we used semantic neighbour manipulations to induce lexical and conceptual co-activation. Our results provide evidence for multiple sources of interaction, both before and after response initiation. While interactive effects can vary across participants, we do not find strong evidence of variation of effects within individuals, suggesting that these interactions are relatively fixed features of each individual's production system.

Phonological Encoding in Sentence Production

2012

Previous tests of the phonological competition model (Dell, 1986) have mostly investigated the effects of phonological overlap (e.g. pick-pin) in isolated word production (e.g. primed picture naming). This is problematic since recent findings suggest that the effect of phonological overlap depends on the syntactic category of the phonologically related words, and few previous studies investigate phonological planning in the context of grammatical strings. We introduce a novel paradigm to examine two predictions of the so called parallel-then-sequential competition model (O‟Seaghdha and Marin, 2000) against data from the distribution of disfluencies in sentence production. We also extend previous work by comparing different forms of phonological overlap (identity vs. similarity) in both word onsets and rhymes.

Articulatory Planning Is Continuous and Sensitive to Informational Redundancy

Phonetica, 2005

Pluymaekers, M., M. Ernestus, and R. H. Baayen This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and tar-get words. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictability from the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven target words. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all target words equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.

Effects of semantic neighbourhood density on spoken word production

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2019

When producing words, it is generally agreed that semantically related words are activated along with the target. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which the number of such semantically related words affects the production of spoken words. The research presented here explores, in detail, the influence of semantic neighbourhood density—the number of words of similar meaning in the lexicon—on picture naming performance in both unimpaired speakers and a large group of individuals with aphasia. In Experiment 1, six different semantic neighbourhood density measures were compared using principal component analysis. Four different semantic neighbourhood density components were identified: feature-based, context-based, association-based, and distant. In Experiment 2, these new measures were used as predictors in an analysis of picture naming data from unimpaired English speakers: no significant effects of semantic neighbourhood factors were observed on either latency o...