Effects of syllable frequency in speech production

Cholin, Joana; Levelt, Willem J. M.; Schiller, Niels O.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.01.009

Cited by 191 publications

(196 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…It is currently believed (e.g., Cholin, Levelt & Schiller, 2006;Levelt & Wheeldon, 1994) that phonological encoding proper (i.e., access to lexical phonological entries and corresponding segments; stress pattern etc.) is followed by access to a "mental syllabary" in which articulatory "gestural scores" for frequent syllables are prespecified.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Additivity of semantic and phonological effects: Evidence from speech production in Mandarin

Zhu

Zhang

Damian

2016

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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A number of previous studies using picture-word interference (PWI) tasks conducted with speakers of Western languages have demonstrated non-additive effects of semantic and form overlap between pictures and words, which may indicate underlying non-discrete processing stages in lexical retrieval. The present study used Mandarin speakers and presented Chinese characters as distractors. In two experiments, we crossed semantic relatedness with "pure" phonological (i.e., orthographically unrelated) relatedness, and found statistically additive effects. In a third experiment, semantic relatedness was crossed with orthographic overlap (phonological overlap was avoided), and once again we found an additive pattern. The results are discussed with regard to possible cross-linguistic differences between Western and non-Western languages in terms of phonological encoding, as well as concerning the locus of relatedness effects in PWI tasks.Key words: speech production, semantic interference, phonological facilitation, lexical selection, MandarinAdditivity of semantics and phonology 3 Speaking involves the retrieval of semantic, syntactic, and phonological/phonetic information of the corresponding words. How these forms of information relate to each other remains a controversial issue in speech production theories (Bi, Xu, & Caramazza, 2009;Dell, 1986;Starreveld & La Heij, 1995, 1996a, 1996b. Serial discrete models (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) argue that for a given target word, only a single selected lexical-semantic/syntactic node ("lemma") spreads its activation to the phonological level, and semantic processing must be completed before phonological processing can begin. Non-serial models dispute some or all of these assumptions, and assume that phonological encoding can proceed based on partial and continuous input from the semantic level. Cascaded models (e.g., Humphreys, Riddoch, & Quinlan, 1988;Morsella & Miozzo, 2002) propose that multiple lexical-semantic candidates which are co-activated during retrieval of the target word transmit activation to the phonological level. Interactive models (e.g., Dell, 1986) additionally assume that transmission of activation between semantic and phonological encoding is bidirectional. In such models, phonological processing begins on the basis of early partial information provided by semantic processes, and partial phonological processing aids in retrieval at the earlier lexical-semantic level.One way of empirically distinguishing discrete from non-discrete (cascaded or interactive) models is to apply "additive-factors logic" (Sternberg, 1969). Two experimental variables are manipulated and their effect on performance is measured.If the two variables show additive effects, then it can be concluded that they affect different and separate processing stages. By contrast, if the two variables show nonAdditivity of semantics and phonology 4 additive effects, then either they act on a single processing stage, or they affect two processing stages but these two stages are c...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Additivity of semantic and phonological effects: Evidence from speech production in Mandarin

Zhu

Zhang

Damian

2016

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…To understand the implications that such a motor practice filter might have, it is necessary to consider the kinds of representations that are commonly thought to underlie speech production. According to most theories, once a word has been selected for production, the system is thought to generate an abstract phonological code; this code in turn is filled in with phonetic codes, which ultimately get articulated using motor programs (Cholin, Levelt, & Schiller, 2006;Laganaro & Alario, 2006;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;MacNeilage, 1970;Sevald, Dell & Cole, 1995). Although any of these levels of representation could be shared by production and perception the motor level has the additional issue of practice to consider.…”

Section: Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accommodating variation: Dialects, idiolects, and speech processing

2008

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Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether different kinds of variation lead to different cognitive and behavioral adjustments. Specifically, we compare adjustments to the same acoustic consequence when it is due to context-independent variation (resulting from articulatory properties unique to a speaker) versus context-conditioned variation (resulting from common articulatory properties of speakers who share a dialect). The contrasting results for these two cases show that the source of a particular acoustic-phonetic variation affects how that variation is handled by the perceptual system. We also show that changes in perceptual representations do not necessarily lead to changes in production.Keywords speech perception; speech production; perceptual learning; coarticulation; dialects; idiolects; language change; speech accommodationPsycholinguists have known for a half century that pronunciation varies for different reasons. For example, Liberman (1957) showed that the acoustics of stop consonants are drastically influenced by adjacent vowels, and Peterson and Barney (1952) showed that the acoustic realization of any particular vowel is influenced by the age, gender, and dialect of the speaker.Some sources of variation are due to unusual articulatory properties of a particular speaker, such as lisps or other speech impediments, or temporary physical states such as speaking with something in one's mouth or being drunk. Other types of variation reflect more general articulatory changes that result from adapting a sound to the phonetic context; such contextually-driven changes are commonly found in dialects: Boston speakers drop their /r/'s only when they occur after vowels (e.g., pahk for park); American English speakers 'flap' /t/ s that occur intervocalically at the onset of an unstressed syllable (e.g., the second /t/ in total) but they never flap the first /t/; and in the American South, /z/ often becomes [d]-like when it occurs before /n/ (for example, [bIdnIs] for business). In these and other ways, pronunciation can be highly variable.Address for correspondence: Mail: Arthur Samuel, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, 631-632-7961, Email: Tanya Kraljic tkraljic@crl.ucsd.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply...

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“…Existing theories (1)(2)(3)(4)(5) differ considerably on details but converge on the assumption that phonological encoding involves selection and sequencing of abstract sound-sized segmental units or phonemes, which have been postulated as units for encoding words in long-term memory (6). Furthermore, most frameworks assume syllable-sized production units, either as abstract structural frames that are filled with segmental content (7,8) or as a mental syllabary that prespecifies articulatory "gestural scores" (9,10).…”

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confidence: 99%

Sound-sized segments are significant for Mandarin speakers

Damian

Kazanina

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

115

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Do speakers of all languages use segmental speech sounds when they produce words? Existing models of language production generally assume a mental representation of individual segmental units, or phonemes, but the bulk of evidence comes from speakers of European languages in which the orthographic system codes explicitly for speech sounds. By contrast, in languages with nonalphabetical scripts, such as Mandarin Chinese, individual speech sounds are not orthographically represented, raising the possibility that speakers of these languages do not use phonemes as fundamental processing units. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) combined with behavioral measurement to investigate the role of phonemes in Mandarin production. Mandarin native speakers named colored line drawings of objects using color adjective-noun phrases; color and object name either shared the initial phoneme or were phonologically unrelated. Whereas naming latencies were unaffected by phoneme repetition, ERP responses were modulated from 200 ms after picture onset. Our ERP findings thus provide strong support for the claim that phonemic segments constitute fundamental units of phonological encoding even for speakers of languages that do not encode such units orthographically.

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Effects of syllable frequency in speech production

Cited by 191 publications

References 89 publications

Additivity of semantic and phonological effects: Evidence from speech production in Mandarin

Additivity of semantic and phonological effects: Evidence from speech production in Mandarin

Accommodating variation: Dialects, idiolects, and speech processing

Sound-sized segments are significant for Mandarin speakers

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