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ESCOP 2011, 17th MEETING OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 29th Sep. - 02nd Oct.

Language production

Saturday, October 01st,   2011 [17:20 - 19:20]

PS_2.112 - What does the articulatory output buffer know about alternative picture names? Evidence against the response-exclusion hypothesis

Hantsch, A. 1 & Mädebach, A. 2

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Donostia, Spain
2 University of Leipzig, Germany

When naming pictures in the presence of a distractor word, a semantic relation between distractor word and picture name interferes with the naming response. Some models take this to reflect a lexical-competition process, while other models assume it to result from a post-lexical response-exclusion mechanism. According to the latter view, the distractor word has privileged access to an articulatory output buffer and has to be purged from it before the picture name can be produced. This buffer is assumed to have access to information which is relevant within a given task, such as gross semantic category information. Any (semantic) similarity between the picture name and the distractor word then should render removal of the distractor more difficult and thus prolong naming latencies. However, more fine-grained semantic information is not accessible to the articulatory output buffer, and thus should not affect naming performance. We tested this assumption by comparing the effect of two semantic distractor conditions keeping the semantic relation between distractor words and the to-be-produced (basic-level) picture names constant, while manipulating only the relation between the distractor and the pictures’ subordinate-level name.




PS_2.113 - The role of planning in pronunciation variation

Hanique, I. 1, 2 & Ernestus, M. 1, 2

1 Radboud University Nijmegen
2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

In everyday speech, words are often produced with reduced pronunciation variants, in which segments are shorter or completely absent. We investigated whether word-final /t/ reduction in Dutch past-participles is affected by the ease of planning of the preceding word, and whether previously found morphological effects may actually be planning effects. We analyzed presence of 1369 /t/s and their durations in two speech corpora representing three speech styles. /t/ appeared more often absent and shorter if the past-participle followed a word that is highly predictable given the preceding context. Furthermore, /t/ was more reduced in irregular past-participles with a high frequency relative to the frequencies of the other inflected forms in the verbal paradigm, that is, in past-participles that can be selected more easily, and thus planned more quickly. Both effects were more pronounced in more spontaneous speech styles, which is as expected if the effects are driven by speech planning. These planning effects have to be incorporated in psycholinguistic models of speech production. Abstractionist models could, for instance, adapt the articulation level. Exemplar-based models have to incorporate planning as a factor influencing the choice of exemplar, or assume an articulation level that can modify the selected exemplar.




PS_2.114 - The functional unit of Japanese word naming: evidence from masked priming

Schiller, N. 1, 5 , Verdonschot, R. 1, 5 , Kiyama, S. 2 , Tamaoka, K. 3 , Kinoshita, S. 4 & La Heij, W. 5

1 Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition & Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
2 Reitaku University, Minami-kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
3 Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
4 MACCS and Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
5 Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Theories of language production generally describe the segment to be the basic unit in phonological encoding. However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language-specific. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora-based, we report the results of four experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 using Japanese kana script demonstrates that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana, and again found facilitation effects only when the whole mora overlapped, but not the onset segment. The fourth experiment distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first three experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable (and again found no priming effect for single segments). Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.




PS_2.115 - Naming Euros, naming Dollars. Do you know what you are naming?

Macizo, P. 1 , Herrera, A. 2 , Morales, L. 1 & Juárez, V. 1

1 University of Granada
2 University of Murcia

In this study we evaluate whether people in Spain and USA access to the monetary value of Euros and Dollars when they name them. The participants named sequences of banknotes grouped by category or mixed with exemplars of other categories. They were faster naming banknotes in the blocked situation which suggests that they did not process the banknotes semantically. The absence of semantic interference effect seems to be mediated by the numbers imprinted on banknotes since participants showed semantic interference when the monetary value was removed from banknotes. These results indicate that people can say aloud the monetary value of Euros and Dollars without an obligatory semantic mediation.




PS_2.116 - Phrase frequency effects in language production

Janssen, N. & Barber, H.

Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

Traditional views on the organization of the mental lexicon argue that lexical storage is reserved for morphologically simple forms (e.g., 'red', 'car', 'plural-s'), and that multi-word sequences whose meaning is transparent (e.g., “the red car”) are not stored, but are generated from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants produced noun + adjective, and noun + noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, two groups of French participants produced noun + adjective, and determiner + noun + adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that short two and three word phrases whose meaning is transparent are stored in the lexicon. These data are inconsistent with the traditional view, and suggest that lexical storage is determined by statistical learning mechanisms that are sensitive to the distributional properties with which linguistic tokens occur in the language environment.




PS_2.117 - Phonological planning during sentence production: beyond the verb

Schnur, T.

Rice University

Previous work about the extent of phonological planning during sentence production shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire grammatical/phonological phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning goes beyond the verb, crossing multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, I found a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like “She kicks the ball”. In a third experiment I altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. These results indicate that phonological planning is not necessarily restricted by grammatical phrase boundaries. That post-verb phonological properties were activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb did not drive the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Implications for models of sentence production are discussed.




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