Five experiments were conducted to investigate how subsyllabic, syllabic, and prosodic information is processed in Cantonese monosyllabic word production. A picture-word interference task was used in which a target picture and a distractor word were presented simultaneously or sequentially. In the first 3 experiments with visually presented distractors, null effects on naming latencies were found when the distractor and the picture name shared the onset, the rhyme, the tone, or both the onset and tone. However, significant facilitation effects were obtained when the target and the distractor shared the rhyme ϩ tone (Experiment 2), the segmental syllable (Experiment 3), or the syllable ϩ tone (Experiment 3). Similar results were found in Experiments 4 and 5 with spoken rather than visual distractors. Moreover, a significant facilitation effect was observed in the rhyme-related condition in Experiment 5, and this effect was not affected by the degree of phonological overlap between the target and the distractor. These results are interpreted in an interactive model, which allows feedback sending from the subsyllabic to the lexical level during the phonological encoding stage in Cantonese word production.
Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate the nature of effective phonological units in Cantonese spoken word production. The names of the pictures were Cantonese monosyllables with a consonant vowel consonant (CVC) structure. Participants' picture-naming responses were faster when the target (e.g., "star" /sing1/) and the distractor shared the same CVC component (e.g., /sing4/, meaning "city"), the same CV component (e.g., /sik6/, "eat"), or the same VC component (e.g., /ging2/, "region"), as opposed to when they were unrelated, and the facilitation effects observed were comparable in size. Also, similar facilitation effects were obtained across the CV tone-related and the VC tone-related conditions, whereas no reliable effect was found in the V tone-related condition. These results indicate that an effective phonological unit in spoken word planning is neither a syllable (without tone) nor a segmental unit, and that the possible candidates lie between the two, at least in Cantonese.
Evidence from previous psycholinguistic research suggests that phonological units such as phonemes have a privileged role during phonological planning in Dutch and English (aka the segment-retrieval hypothesis). However, the syllable-retrieval hypothesis previously proposed for Mandarin assumes that only the entire syllable unit (without the tone) can be prepared in advance in speech planning. Using Cantonese Chinese as a test case, the present study was conducted to investigate whether the syllable-retrieval hypothesis can be applied to other Chinese spoken languages. In four implicit priming (form-preparation) experiments, participants were asked to learn various sets of prompt-response di-syllabic word pairs and to utter the corresponding response word upon seeing each prompt. The response words in a block were either phonologically related (homogeneous) or unrelated (heterogeneous). Participants' naming responses were significantly faster in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous conditions when the response words shared the same word-initial syllable (without the tone) (Exps.1 and 4) or body (Exps.3 and 4), but not when they shared merely the same word-initial phoneme (Exp.2). Furthermore, the priming effect observed in the syllable-related condition was significantly larger than that in the body-related condition (Exp. 4). Although the observed syllable priming effects and the null effect of word-initial phoneme are consistent with the syllable-retrieval hypothesis, the body-related (sub-syllabic) priming effects obtained in this Cantonese study are not. These results suggest that the syllable-retrieval hypothesis is not generalizable to all Chinese spoken languages and that both syllable and sub-syllabic constituents are legitimate planning units in Cantonese speech production.
The time course of phonological encoding in Mandarin monosyllabic word production was investigated by using the picture-word interference paradigm. Participants were asked to name pictures in Mandarin while visual distractor words were presented before, at, or after picture onset (i.e., stimulus-onset asynchrony/SOA = -100, 0, or +100 ms, respectively). Compared with the unrelated control, the distractors sharing atonal syllables with the picture names significantly facilitated the naming responses at -100- and 0-ms SOAs. In addition, the facilitation effect of sharing word-initial segments only appeared at 0-ms SOA, and null effects were found for sharing word-final segments. These results indicate that both syllables and subsyllabic units play important roles in Mandarin spoken word production and more critically that syllabic processing precedes subsyllabic processing. The current results lend strong support to the proximate units principle (O'Seaghdha, Chen, & Chen, 2010), which holds that the phonological structure of spoken word production is language-specific and that atonal syllables are the proximate phonological units in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, the significance of word-initial segments over word-final segments suggests that serial processing of segmental information seems to be universal across Germanic languages and Chinese, which remains to be verified in future studies.
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