Do speakers have access to a mental syllabary?

Abstract

The first, theoretical part of this paper sketches a framework for phonological encoding in which the speaker successively generates phonological syllables in connected speech. The final stage of this process, phonetic encoding, consists of accessing articulatory gestural scores for each of these syllables in a "mental syllabary ". The second, experimental part studies various predictions derived from this theory. The main finding is a syllable frequency effect: words ending in a high-frequent syllable are named faster than words ending in a low-frequent syllable. As predicted, this syllable frequency effect is independent of and additive to the effect of word frequency on naming latency. The effect, moreover, is not due to the complexity of the word-final syllable. In the General Discussion, the syllabary model is further elaborated with respect to phonological underspecification and activation spreading. Alternative accounts of the empirical findings in terms of core syllables and demisyllables are considered.

Effects of syllable frequency in speech production

“…However, despite the general agreement that syllables constitute an important linguistic and phonological/phonetic unit (see Blevins, 1995;Fujimura & Lovins, 1978;Hooper, 1972;Kenstowicz, 1994;Selkirk, 1982) and the support from speech error analyses (Fromkin, 1971;Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1992) and especially meta-linguistic tasks (for Dutch : Schiller, Meyer, & Levelt, 1997;for English: Treiman & Danis, 1988), there is to date relatively little psycholinguistic on-line evidence that the syllable serves as a functional unit in speech production. This also holds for the data reported in Levelt and Wheeldon (1994)-see below. Furthermore, what evidence there is for the functional importance of the syllable is orthogonal to the issue of whether or not there is mental storage for precompiled syllabic programs.…”

“…A crucial assumption of Levelt's theory is that speakers have access to a repository of syllabic gestures. This repository, coined the 'mental syllabary' (Levelt, 1992;Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994), contains the articulatory scores for at least the highfrequency syllables of the language. The model assumes that as soon as a syllable emerges during incremental syllabification, the corresponding syllabic articulatory gesture will be selected from the repository in a pre-motor area (Dronkers, 1996;Indefrey & Levelt, 2000;Kerzel & Bekkering, 2000).…”

“…WEAVERCC adopts Dell's (1986) assumption of word form retrieval by the spread of activation and Levelt's (1992) on-line syllabification and access to a syllabary (Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994).…”

“…It would be efficient to store these over learned syllabic patterns and retrieve them as wholes, instead of computing them anew time and again as they appear during syllabification. Levelt and Wheeldon (1994) studied this storage hypothesis by comparing access latencies of high-versus low-frequency syllables. They had subjects produce disyllabic words consisting of high-versus low-frequency syllables.…”

“…less than 5% of the entire syllable inventory in those languages, suffice to produce approximately 80% of all speech in those languages (Schiller, Meyer, Baayen, & Levelt, 1996). To account for the easy and rapid production of these frequently occurring syllables, Levelt and Wheeldon (1994) proposed a repository of ready-made syllabic motor programs, called the Mental Syllabary.…”