The “BIG BIRD” of the “YELLOW YOUNG” Man: Do Nontarget Properties Cascade?

Abstract

This study investigated whether in speech production object properties flow in a cascaded manner or whether cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw pictured objects and had to state either their size (GRAND or PETIT-meaning big and small) or their name. The size of the objects varied as a function of the way they were presented on the computer screen (Experiment 1) or their real size in the world (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, faces of young and old men were coloured in yellow or in green. The task was to name either the colour (JAUNE or VERT, meaning yellow and green, respectively) or the age (JEUNE or VIEUX, meaning young and old, respectively) of the face. In Experiments 1 and 2, no reliable effects of phonological relatedness ("GORILLE-grand"-a big gorilla) were found on the object-naming latencies. However, size-naming latencies were shorter when the adjective shared the initial phoneme of the picture name (i.e., "GRAND-gorille") than when it did not (i.e., "GRAND-dinosaure"-saying "big" in response to a big dinosaur). In Experiment 3, phonological overlap did not affect colour naming latencies, or age naming latencies. Overall, these findings strongly suggest that cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity in conceptually driven naming tasks.

Phonological coactivation in the bilinguals’ two languages: Evidence from the color naming task

“…Overall, the properties of pictures such as their color, size, etc., are not lexicalized unless they are required by the task. For instance, Roux, Bonin and Kandel (2013) showed that the naming of the object size (i.e., grand ; meaning big in French) was facilitated when the picture name was phonologically related ( grange , meaning barn in French); however, this phonological effect was not found when participants produced the name of the objects.…”

Phonological activation of category coordinates in spoken word production: Evidence for cascaded processing in English but not in Mandarin

“…In a variation of the task in which a single colored picture is presented, and speakers name either the object or the color, phonological facilitation is found when colors are named (and objects ignored) but not when objects are named (and colors ignored; e.g., Dumay & Damian, 2011; Kuipers & La Heij, 2009). This asymmetry suggests that cascading is limited to the “primary” dimension (i.e., the object name) but nontarget properties such as color (or size, as shown more recently by Roux, Bonin, & Kandel, 2014) do not seem to be processed in a cascaded fashion. Hence, the evidence suggests a “limited cascadedness” view of spoken word production.…”

“RED” matters when naming “CAR”: The cascading activation of nontarget properties.

“…In line with other findings (Kuipers & La Heij, 2009; Mädebach, Alekseeva, & Jescheniak, 2011), this suggests that the activation of nontarget colors does not spread freely to the phonological level. We recently thoroughly addressed this issue by focusing on a visual object property other than color, namely object size (Roux, Bonin, & Kandel, 2013). In our study, participants were asked to name either the identity of depicted objects or their size (i.e., big or small ).…”

“…Indeed, Janssen, Alario, and Caramazza (2008) reported that English native speakers were faster when producing object names that were phonologically related to the name of the associated color (e.g., a blue BALL), whereas this is not the case in French native speakers. According to these authors, this is because color adjectives precede nouns in English but not in French, suggesting that word order constrains the flow of activation that is able to reach the phonological segment layer (but see Roux, Bonin, & Kandel, 2013). However, it must be stressed that these results have not as yet been replicated (see Kuipers & La Heij, 2009; Mädebach et al, 2011; see Dumay & Damian, 2011 for failures to replicate).…”