Inter-subject variability modulates phonological advance planning in the production of adjective-noun phrases

Abstract

The literature on advance phonological planning in adjective-noun phrases (NPs) presents diverging results: while many experimental studies suggest that the entire NP is encoded before articulation, other results favor a span of encoding limited to the first word. Although cross-linguistic differences in the structure of adjective-NPs may account for some of these contrasting results, divergences have been reported even among similar languages and syntactic structures. Here we examined whether inter-individual differences account for variability in the span of phonological planning in the production of French NPs, where previous results indicated encoding limited to the first word. The span of phonological encoding is tested with the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm using phonological distractors related to the noun or to the adjective of the NPs. In Experiment 1, phonological priming effects were limited to the first word in adjective NPs whichever the position of the adjective (pre-nominal or post-nominal). Crucially, phonological priming effects on the second word interacted with speakers' production speed suggesting different encoding strategies for participants. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis further with a larger group of participants. Results clearly showed that slow and fast initializing participants presented different phonological priming patterns on the last element of adjective-NPs: while the first word was primed by a distractor for all speakers, only the slow speaker group presented a priming effect on the second element of the NP. These results show that the span of phonological encoding is modulated by inter-individual strategies: in experimental paradigms some speakers plan word by word whereas others encode beyond the initial word. We suggest that the diverging results reported in the literature on advance phonological planning may partly be reconciled in light of the present results.

Contextual phonological errors and omission of obligatory liaison as a window into a reduced span of phonological encoding

“…As exposed in the introduction, there is fairly strong evidence that the span of phonological encoding in healthy speakers encompasses the initial word, especially in the production of adjective-noun phrases (Costa & Camarazza, 2002;Michel Lange & Laganaro, 2014). For French speakers, this claim is especially supported by the fact that, to be able to produce a liaison sequence, speakers need to have planned at least up to the first phoneme of the second word of a liaison sequence.…”

“…More recently, researchers focussed on the other question, namely whether the span of encoding is a fixed or a F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y 8 flexible unit. The results reported by these studies actually show that the planning unit is subject to inter-individual differences (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011;Michel Lange & Laganaro, 2014;Wagner, Jescheniak, & Schriefers, 2010). Nevertheless, many investigations converge on the span of encoding extending over the initial word, at least in adjectival noun-phrases with prenominal adjectives (Costa & Caramazza, 2002;Damian & Dumay, 2007;Dumay, Damian, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Perez, 2009;Schnur et al, 2006).…”

“…The syntactic structure of the message was examined as a potential factor in different studies but, again, no coherence emerges from the literature. While Schriefers and Teruel (1999) observed a different span of encoding for different syntactic structures based on cross-linguistic studies (German and French), Michel Lange and Laganaro (2014) failed to report the same effect for similar syntactic structures within the same language (French). More recently, researchers focussed on the other question, namely whether the span of encoding is a fixed or a F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y 8 flexible unit.…”

“…Both liaison (Michel Lange & Laganaro, 2014) and tongue-twister sequences (Goldrick & Blumstein, 2006;Whilshire, 1999) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 segmental anticipatory errors. The tongue twister sequences were aimed to increase the probability of phonological errors, but we failed to show significant results in terms of error rates with tongue-twister sequences.…”

“…The failure to plan ahead consequently leads to failure in correctly producing a liaison. Interestingly, even though liaison omission is considered a speech error in French, a study by Michel Lange and Laganaro (2014) suggested that speakers might reduce their span of encoding, even for liaison sequences, as a strategy in an experimental setting. In a picture naming task, the authors observed that the failure to produce the liaison was correlated with naming latencies.…”