Michel Lange, V. & Laganaro, M.
University of Geneva
How much of the sentence to be produced is encoded phonologically before one starts articulation? Some authors (Levelt, 1989) assume that one phonological word is the unit of encoding. Others argue that one can encode more than one phonological word before articulating (Schnur et al, 2006, Oppermann et al, 2010). In this study, we compared the production of single words (W1) to two word (2W) noun-phrases. If speakers encode 1W at a time, one should expect similar production latencies (RTs) for 1W vs 2W noun phrases (NPs). Furthermore, we investigated whether syntax modulates this issue. If so, two different word order in 2W NPs should lead to different RTs.
Experiment 1 was a picture naming task with three conditions: Noun, Adjective+Noun, Noun+Adjective with same nouns in all conditions. The frequency of the sequences was matched across 2W conditions. RTs were shorter for A+N than N+A, both being longer than N. Experiment 2 used the same stimuli in a reading task and showed similar results thus ruling out the hypothesis that shorter RTs for A+N was due to mapping from visual to lexical-semantic levels.
As the difference between A+N and N+A may be linked to higher lexical frequency of the adjectives in A+N vs N+A, we ran two new experiments (Experiment 3: picture naming and 4: reading) in which adjectives’ frequency was also matched across conditions. We replicated the results for both experiments (N<A+N< N+A).
Overall, these results show that encoding 1W differs from encoding 2W suggesting that more than 1W is encoded when producing a 2W NP. Crucially, longer RTS for N+A vs A+N suggest that speed of encoding processes is not independent of syntax. As same results were observed in picture naming and reading, we suggest that these results are accounted for by the level of phonological encoding.