Consonant Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Nonword Repetition Are Not Articulatory in Nature

Abstract

Purpose: Most research examining long-term-memory effects on nonword repetition (NWR) has focused on lexical-level variables. Phoneme-level variables have received little attention, although there are reasons to expect significant sublexical effects in NWR. To further understand the underlying processes of NWR, this study examined effects of sublexical long-term phonological knowledge by testing whether performance differs when the stimuli comprise consonants acquired later versus earlier in speech development. Method: Thirty (Experiment 1) and 20 (Experiment 2) college students completed tasks that investigated whether an experimental phoneme-level variable (consonant age of acquisition) similarly affects NWR and lexical-access tasks designed to vary in articulatory, auditory-perceptual, and phonological short-term-memory demands. The lexical-access tasks were performed in silence or with concurrent articulation to explore whether consonant age-of-acquisition effects arise before or after articulatory planning. Results: NWR accuracy decreased on items comprising later-versus earlier-acquired phonemes. Similar consonant age-of-acquisition effects were observed in accuracy measures of nonword reading and lexical decision performed in silence or with concurrent articulation. Conclusion: Results indicate that NWR performance is sensitive to phoneme-level phonological knowledge in longterm memory. NWR, accordingly, should not be regarded as a diagnostic tool for pure impairment of phonological short-term memory.

Consonant age of acquisition effects are robust in children's nonword repetition performance

“…The findings from this current work with first- and second-grade children are similar to the CAoA effect observed by Moore et al (2017). There was a significant early-late phoneme difference in NWR accuracy, and the magnitude of the difference generally increased as syllable length increased (with the exception of the four-syllable nonwords).…”

“…In Moore et al’s (2017) previous work examining the CAoA effect in NWR and other lexical access tasks, their stimulus lists were carefully balanced on many lexical and sublexical factors that are often linked with vocabulary acquisition (e.g., wordlikeness, phonotactic probability, etc.) in order to strengthen the claim that any observed CAoA effects are relatively independent from other aspects of word knowledge.…”

“…All stimuli and tasks were taken from Moore et al (2017). The development of the stimuli and tasks will be restated briefly here to facilitate understanding of the current work.…”

“…Task administration for the three experimental tasks was identical to the method described in the Experiment 1 tasks of Moore et al (2017). The methods are briefly described below.…”

Subthalamic nucleus and sensorimotor cortex activity during speech production

“…The stimuli were chosen from an existing stimulus set, and were balanced along a number of psycholinguistic parameters, such as phonological and orthographic neighborhood density, bigram frequency, phonotactic and biphone probability, etc. (for a detailed description of the stimuli, see Moore, Fiez, and Tompkins, 2017). For the purposes of the present study, the stimuli were grouped into two categories based on the primary articulator involved in the production of the initial consonants:…”