Hilliard, C., Furth, K. & Jaeger, T.F. (2011). Phonological Encoding in Sentence Production. The 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci11). Boston, MA. July, 2011, 3070-3075. (original) (raw)
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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.
Theories of lexical production differ in whether they allow phonological processes to affect lexical selection directly. While some accounts, such as interactive activation accounts, predict (weak) early effects of phonological processes during lexical selection via feedback connections, strictly serial architectures do not make this prediction. We present evidence from lexical selection during unscripted sentence production that lexical selection is affected by the phonological form of recently produced words. In a video description experiment, participants described scenes that were compatible with several near meaning-equivalent verbs. We find that speakers are less likely than expected by chance to select a verb form that would result in phonological onset overlap with the subject of the sentence. Additional evidence from the distribution of disfluencies immediately preceding the verb argues that this effect is due to early effects on lexical selection, rather than later corrective processes, such as self-monitoring. Taken together, these findings support accounts that allow early feedback from phonological processes to word level nodes, even during lexical selection.
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.
We investigate phonological encoding during unscripted sentence production, focusing on the effect of phonological overlap on phonological encoding. Previous work on this question has almost exclusively employed isolated word production or highly scripted multi-word production. These studies have led to conflicting results: some studies found that phonological overlap between two words facilitates phonological encoding, while others found inhibitory effects. One worry with many of these paradigms is that they involve processes that are not typical to everyday language use, which calls into question to what extent their findings speak to the architectures and mechanisms underlying language production. We present a paradigm to investigate the consequences of phonological overlap between words in a sentence while leaving speakers much of the lexical and structural choices typical in everyday language use. Adult native speakers of English described events in short video clips. We annotated the presence of disfluencies and the speech rate at various points throughout the sentence, as well as the constituent order. We find that phonological overlap has an inhibitory effect on phonological encoding. Specifically, if adjacent content words share their phonological onset (e.g., hand the hammer), they are preceded by production difficulty, as reflected in fluency and speech rate. We also find that this production difficulty affects speakers’ constituent order preferences during grammatical encoding. We discuss our results and previous works to isolate the properties of other paradigms that resulted in facilitatory or inhibitory results. The data from our paradigm also speak to questions about the scope of phonological planning in unscripted speech and as to whether phonological and grammatical encoding interact.
Incremental Phonological Encoding during Unscripted Sentence Production
Frontiers in Psychology, 2012
We investigate phonological encoding during unscripted sentence production, focusing on the effect of phonological overlap on phonological encoding. Previous work on this question has almost exclusively employed isolated word production or highly scripted multi-word production. These studies have led to conflicting results: some studies found that phonological overlap between two words facilitates phonological encoding, while others found inhibitory effects. One worry with many of these paradigms is that they involve processes that are not typical to everyday language use, which calls into question to what extent their findings speak to the architectures and mechanisms underlying language production. We present a paradigm to investigate the consequences of phonological overlap between words in a sentence while leaving speakers much of the lexical and structural choices typical in everyday language use. Adult native speakers of English described events in short video clips. We annotated the presence of disfluencies and the speech rate at various points throughout the sentence, as well as the constituent order. We find that phonological overlap has an inhibitory effect on phonological encoding. Specifically, if adjacent content words share their phonological onset (e.g., hand the hammer), they are preceded by production difficulty, as reflected in fluency and speech rate. We also find that this production difficulty affects speakers' constituent order preferences during grammatical encoding. We discuss our results and previous works to isolate the properties of other paradigms that resulted in facilitatory or inhibitory results. The data from our paradigm also speak to questions about the scope of phonological planning in unscripted speech and as to whether phonological and grammatical encoding interact.
Effects of phonological competition on speech planning and execution
2015
Competition between phonologically similar sequences in an utterance is one of the major causes for speech production errors. Additionally, phonological competition has been found to increase planning time and slow down speech rate in CVC word pairs. The aims of this study are to investigate the timecourse of phonological competition by employing different tasks and by a detailed gestural analysis. Effects of competition in the onset ("top cop" and “pay Kay”) are compared to competition in the coda (e.g. "top tock") and both were compared to sequences of identical words (e.g. "top top"). Results from three studies are reported: acoustic latencies from a delayed naming task and a simple naming task (18 speakers), and articulatory latencies from a delayed naming task using EMA (6 speakers). Reaction time was affected by competition but not by locus. Mismatch in the coda lengthened the execution time most prominently in the final rime.
The (in)dependence of articulation and lexical planning during isolated word production
Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 2016
Words differ in the number of phonologically similar neighbors they have in the lexicon. The density of a word’s phonological neighborhood has been argued to affect lexical planning and articulation. Here, we investigate whether the effects of phonological neighborhood density on articulation is mediated through its effects on lexical planning or whether phonological neighborhood density has as an independent affect on articulation. In a picture naming experiment, we investigate the effect of neighborhood density on both lexical planning and articulation. We then test the extent to which the time course of lexical planning predicts a word’s articulation and whether potential effects of density on articulation can be reduced to its effects on planning. We find that planning does influence articulation but there is an independent effect of neighborhood density on articulation. This leads us to review and discuss competing accounts of lexical planning, articulation, the link between them, and the locus of phonological neighborhood densities effects on the two. Keywords: language production; lexical planning; articulation; neighborhood density; confusability
Single word production in English: The role of subsyllabic units during phonological encoding.
… of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and …, 2000
Five experiments investigated the role of sublexical units in English single word production. L. Ferrand, J. Segui, and G. W. Humphreys (1997) reported a priming effect that was most effective when primes and targets shared the first syllable. Experiments 1A and 1B failed to replicate this effect but Experiment 1B showed that subsyllabic units play a role in speech production. This role was further explored using a picture naming task in Experiment 2. Naming latencies were shortest when the segmental overlap between prime and target (the picture name) was largest, regardless of the syllable structure of the target. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated this segmental overlap effect with different sets of words as targets. Experiment 5 showed that the magnitude of the overlap effect increased with longer prime exposure duration. The implications of these results for theories of phonological encoding in speech production are discussed.
Memory & Cognition, 2003
In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B replicate and extend observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /bRiz/-/bRik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g., /bREz/-/bRik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (e.g., /bOl/-/bOt/). Conversely, with a three-phoneme overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes (e.g., /bagEt/-/bagaZ/). In Experiment 4, an inhibitory effect was again observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme but not when they mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes when the time between the offset of overlapping segments in the primes and the onset of overlapping segments in the targets was controlled for. The data thus indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes.
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.