A b stra c tThis study examines whether the production of words with two phonological variants involves single or multiple lexical phonological representations. Three production experiments investigated the roles of the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of French words with schwa: the schwa variant (e.g., [fanetR]) and the reduced variant (e.g., [fnetR]). In two naming tasks and in a symbol-word association learning task, variants with higher relative frequencies were produced faster. This suggests that the production lexicon keeps a frequency count for each variant and hence that schwa words are represented in the production lexicon with two different lexemes. In addition, the advantage for schwa variants over reduced variants in the naming tasks but not in the learning task and the absence of a variant relative frequency effect for schwa variants produced in isolation support the hypothesis that context affects the variants' lexical activation and modulates the effect of variant relative frequency. 2In tro d u ctio n Many words in connected speech appear in a non-canonical form (e.g., Johnson 2004).Despite this fact, it is only during the last two decades that psycholinguistic studies of speech comprehension have gone beyond studying canonical speech and have begun to examine how listeners recognize non-canonical variants of words. Findings on assimilation (e.g., Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996 Snoeren, Segui & Halle, 2008), nasal flap (e.g., Ranbom & Connine, 2007) and schwa deletion (e.g., Connine, Ranbom & Patterson, 2008;Kuijpers, van Donselaar & Cutler, 1996;Racine & Grosjean, 2000, 2005Spinelli & Gros-Balthazard, 2007) have provided a deeper understanding of the recognition of this everyday form of speech. For production, in contrast, a similar shift in research has not yet taken place. Our current knowledge of how words are represented in the lexicon and encoded during production comes from experiments using canonical word forms only. What we know about phonological variants comes essentially from corpus analyses and acoustic studies. Although recent corpus studies have started to address these questions (see for instance Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand & Jurafsky, 2009), so far they have only provided little and circumstantial information about the nature of the lexical representations of words with several variants and about the mechanisms (including their time course) underlying the production of such variants. For more direct information, on-line experimental data are needed. The aim of this work is to provide such data.Most models of speech production and comprehension can be situated along a continuum with respect to their assumptions about the mental lexicon. Traditional psycholinguistic models are heavily influenced by generative grammar (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), in which words are generally assumed to have only one lexical representation, with 3 their other pronunciation variants being computed by means of phonological or phonetic rules.For instance, many authors assume that F...
A major effort in cognitive neuroscience of language is to define the temporal and spatial characteristics of the core cognitive processes involved in word production. One approach consists in studying the effects of linguistic and pre-linguistic variables in picture naming tasks. So far, studies have analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) during word production by examining one or two variables with factorial designs. Here we extended this approach by investigating simultaneously the effects of multiple theoretical relevant predictors in a picture naming task. High density EEG was recorded on 31 participants during overt naming of 100 pictures. ERPs were extracted on a trial by trial basis from picture onset to 100 ms before the onset of articulation. Mixed-effects regression models were conducted to examine which variables affected production latencies and the duration of periods of stable electrophysiological patterns (topographic maps). Results revealed an effect of a pre-linguistic variable, visual complexity, on an early period of stable electric field at scalp, from 140 to 180 ms after picture presentation, a result consistent with the proposal that this time period is associated with visual object recognition processes. Three other variables, word Age of Acquisition, Name Agreement, and Image Agreement influenced response latencies and modulated ERPs from ~380 ms to the end of the analyzed period. These results demonstrate that a topographic analysis fitted into the single trial ERPs and covering the entire processing period allows one to associate the cost generated by psycholinguistic variables to the duration of specific stable electrophysiological processes and to pinpoint the precise time-course of multiple word production predictors at once.
This study presents an analysis of over 4000 tokens of words produced as variants with and without schwa in a French corpus of radio-broadcasted speech. In order to determine which of the many variables mentioned in the literature influence variant choice, 17 predictors were tested in the same analysis. Only five of these variables appeared to condition variant choice. The question of the processing stage, or locus, of this alternation process is also addressed in a comparison of the variables that predict variant choice with the variables that predict the acoustic duration of schwa in variants with schwa. Only two variables predicting variant choice also predict schwa duration. The limited overlap between the predictors for variant choice and for schwa duration, combined with the nature of these variables, suggest that the variants without schwa do not result from a phonetic process of reduction; that is, they are not the endpoint of gradient schwa shortening. Rather, these variants are generated early in the production process, either during phonological encoding or word-form retrieval. These results, based on naturally produced speech, provide a useful complement to on-line production experiments using artificial speech tasks.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.