The effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit in spoken word production

Mem Cogn (2015) 43:563–578 DOI 10.3758/s13421-014-0484-0 The effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit in spoken word production Chuchu Li & Min Wang & William Idsardi Published online: 15 November 2014 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2014 Abstract Two experiments using the form-preparation paradigm were conducted to investigate the effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit during spoken word production with native Mandarin speakers. In both experiments, participants were instructed to memorize nine prompt-response monosyllabic word pairs, after which an associative naming session was conducted in which the prompts were presented and participants were asked to say the corresponding response names as quickly and accurately as possible. In both experiments, the response words in the homogeneous lists shared the same onsets, or shared the same rimes; the response names had no common aspects of pronunciation in the heterogeneous lists. Chinese characters (Experiment 1) and Pinyin (phonetic transcription of the characters) (Experiment 2) were used to investigate the effect of the orthographic form. Significant onset facilitation and rime inhibition was shown for Pinyin syllables but not for characters. The contrasts of the onset and rime effect in the two orthographic forms suggest that a specific phonological unit is promoted in spoken word production in a certain orthographic form. Pinyin cued the participants to prepare the onset whereas Chinese characters did not. The rime interference effect may arise as a result of lexical competition in spoken word production. Keywords Orthography . Phonological preparation unit . Spoken word production C. Li : M. Wang (*) Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, 3304C Benjamin Building, College Park 20742, MD, USA e-mail: W. Idsardi Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA Introduction Spoken word production involves the operation of a series of cognitive mechanisms. A general top-down architecture of production starts from message or concept encoding, to lemma selection, lexeme retrieval, phonemic segment retrieval, syllable construction, and, finally, to articulation (Ferreira, 2010). Phonological retrieval and encoding is an indispensable process in language production. The WEAVER++ model (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) suggests that at the beginning of phonological encoding in production, metrical and segmental units (e.g., stress and phonemes) are accessed in a parallel fashion. Later on, the phonemic segments are linearized in a syllabified organization that guides articulation. However, is the process of phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production the same across different languages? If not, what factors are responsible for the differences? In particular, does the orthographic form that represents the language matter? The present study investigated whether the use of different orthographic forms for the same language has an impact on phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production. We use the term “preparation unit” to refer to the phonological unit that is retrieved from the lexicon at the beginning of phonological encoding. The form-preparation paradigm The form-preparation task, also known as the implicit priming paradigm, has been frequently used to investigate the nature of the preparation unit in spoken word production (e.g., Chen, Chen, & Dell, 2002; Cholin, Schiller, & Levelt, 2004; Kureta, et al., 2006; Meyer, 1990, 1991; O’Seaghdha, Chen, & Chen, 2010). The task involves an 564 associative-learning session and a naming session. In the associative-learning session, participants memorize some prompt-response word pairs (e.g., night-day, wet-dew, and bread-dough). After participants have informed the experimenters that they have memorized all of the pairs, an associative naming session is immediately conducted in which prompt words appear unpredictably and the participants are required to say the response word as quickly and accurately as possible, while their response time is recorded (e.g., when the word night is presented, participants need to say the word day). The rationale of this paradigm is that, compared with the heterogeneous (or control) context in which response words do not share any elements (e.g., three response words are day, sea, pie), in a homogeneous context where the response words share the same initial element (e.g., the initial phoneme is always /d/ for day, dew and dough), the fore-knowledge of the initial element allows the participants to prepare their first phonological unit in production, thus facilitating their naming latency. The smallest ingredient that can lead to such a form-preparation effect is referred to as the preparation unit. Meyer (1990, 1991) studied the preparation unit in Dutch using the form-preparation paradigm. She found that the preparation unit did not differ within a language when words with different lengths were produced. Native Dutch speakers benefited from the fore-knowledge of the onset of a set of words regardless of whether the words were short (e.g., monosyllabic words) or long (e.g., disyllabic words). Furthermore, the fore-knowledge of later shared components of a set of words did not elicit any significant effects, since manipulating the similarity of the rime, coda, or the second syllable of a word did not lead to a form-preparation effect. A possible explanation is that the assembly of the phonological units is sequential. Participants always need to prepare the utterance of the onset of response words first, and then proceed to the rime. Given that measuring the response time of spoken word production is about the time participants take to produce the first sound of a word, fore-knowledge of the later components does not lead to a faster response time. Roelofs (1999) further showed that the benefit from the fore-knowledge of shared onset in the form-preparation paradigm is driven by shared segmental information but not phonetic features. Neither the place nor the manner of articulation of the initial phoneme affected the form-preparation effect in Dutch (e.g., although / p/ and /b/ are both bilabial and stop phonemes, they did not yield a preparation effect when speakers produced names such as bajes, bami, paling); and only sharing the exact same initial phoneme provided a benefit. Finally, fore-knowledge of simply metrical properties such as the number of syllables, primary stress location, or tonal information did not benefit the preparation of spoken word production, although variability in these properties may reduce the benefits from the advance Mem Cogn (2015) 43:563–578 knowledge of the initial segment (Chen, et al., 2002; Roelofs & Meyer, 1998). The Preparation Unit in Different Languages and the Influence of Orthography Research using the form-preparation task suggests that (...truncated)