Lexical selection and phonological encoding during language production: Evidence for cascaded processing.

The time course of lexicalization during production was explored using a production priming procedure. Participants were presented with pictures to name. Occasionally, a visual target word was presented following a picture, and participants named the word. In Experiments 1A and 1B, phonological priming was found for targets related to the dominant name of a picture, as well as for those related to a near-synonymous name. These results suggest that phonological activation occurs for multiple lexical candidates. In Experiments 2A and 2B, semantic priming was found to arise earlier than phonological priming. In Experiment 3, no priming was found for words phonologically related to category associates, suggesting that the activation of such items is weak. Overall, the results are supportive of a cascaded processing model of lexicalization in which activation spreads continuously from semantic to phonological levels of representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from masked phonological priming.

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch–French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first- and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual lexical access is initially phonological: 2. Evidence from phonological priming by homophones and pseudohomophones.

Seven experiments were conducted that examined phonological and orthographic priming of naming using three- and four-field masking procedures with prolonged targets. Experiments 1–3 found significant phonological priming by homophones (TOWED–toad) that was independent of prime identifiability and prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 30, 60, or 250 ms). Subsequent experiments found significant phonological priming by pseudohomophones (TODE–toad) that was similarly independent of prime identifiability and SOA. Collectively, the limited effects of orthographic control primes (TOLD–toad, TODS–toad) and the pronounced and orthographically independent effects of phonological primes suggest (a) a leading role in visual word perception for a fast-acting, automatic, assembled phonology, and (b) a phonological basis, rather than an abstract graphemic basis, for the processing equivalency of letter variations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract word deficits in aphasia: Evidence from semantic priming.

J.G. and D.E. are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have selective problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semantic deficit for abstract words. The authors show that this is not the case by means of a semantic priming task that tests for implicit knowledge of the meanings of abstract and concrete words. Spoken word pairs that were either abstract or concrete synonyms (e.g., street-road or luck-chance) were presented; both Ss showed priming for the abstract and concrete pairs. The researchers followed up by asking the Ss to produce definitions to spoken abstract and concrete words; these definitions were also normal. The priming and definition data suggest that the semantic representations of abstract words in these Ss were relatively unimpaired. The researchers found that the Ss have problems only with spoken abstract words in just those tasks where normal controls also have difficulty. In contrast, they clearly have deficits in reading abstract words aloud, which may be due to problems with output phonology. Implications of these data for claims concerning hemispheric differences in the representation of abstract and concrete words are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time course of phonological activation during reading: Evidence from eye fixations.

Eye fixation data suggest that readers use orthographic codes rather than phonological codes to activate word meanings. Whereas proofreading data show that readers are less likely to detect homophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking feat) than nonhomophonic errors (e.g., He was in his silk stocking fate), the eye fixations revealed that readers initially experienced as much difficulty encountering a homophonic error as a nonhomophonic one. However, homophony facilitated the recovery process, thus suggesting that phonology has its influence after lexical access. Exp 1 showed that the findings were consistent whether the error was the lower frequency homophone (stocking feat) or the higher frequency homophone (feet of courage). Exp 2 showed that proofreading responses are unreliable indices of error detection because even when readers fail to make an overt error detection response, their eye fixations reveal that they have detected the error. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing phonological and semantic ambiguity: Evidence from semantic priming at different SOAs.

Disambiguation of heterophonic and homophonic homographs was investigated in Hebrew using semantic priming. Ambiguous primes were followed by unambiguous targets at 100 msec, 250 msec, and 750 msec stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Lexical decision for targets related to the dominant phonological alternatives of heterophonic homographs was facilitated at all SOAs. Targets related to subordinate alternatives were facilitated only at SOAs of 250 msec or longer. When the primes were homophonic homographs, semantic relationship facilitated lexical decision to targets at all SOAs regardless of the dominance of the meaning to which the targets were related. These data can be accounted for by assuming multiple lexical entries for heterophonic homographs, single lexical entries for homophonic homographs, and phonological mediation of accessing meanings. Language-specific factors probably account for the long-lasting activation of subordinate meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextual insensitivity in schizophrenic language processing: Evidence from lexical ambiguity.

The authors investigated whether contextual failures in schizophrenia are due to deficits in the detection of context or the inhibition of contextually irrelevant information. Eighteen schizophrenia patients and 24 nonpsychiatric controls were tested via a cross-modal semantic priming task. Participants heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions about visual targets related to the homonyms' dominant or subordinate meanings. When sentences moderately biased subordinate meanings (e.g., the animal enclosure meaning of pen), schizophrenia patients showed priming of dominant targets (e.g., paper) and subordinate targets (e.g., pig). In contrast, controls showed priming only of subordininate targets. When contexts strongly biased subordinate meanings, both groups showed priming only of subordinate targets. The results suggest that inhibitory deficits rather than context detection deficits underlie contextual failures in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The phonological loop as a language learning device.

A relatively simple model of the phonological loop (A. D. Baddeley, 1986), a component of working memory, has proved capable of accommodating a great deal of experimental evidence from normal adult participants, children, and neuropsychological patients. Until recently, however, the role of this subsystem in everyday cognitive activities was unclear. In this article the authors review studies of word learning by normal adults and children, neuropsychological patients, and special developmental populations, which provide evidence that the phonological loop plays a crucial role in learning the novel phonological forms of new words. The authors propose that the primary purpose for which the phonological loop evolved is to store unfamiliar sound patterns while more permanent memory records are being constructed. Its use in retaining sequences of familiar words is, it is argued, secondary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Suedohomofoan effects in visual word recognition: Evidence for phonological processing.

Investigated the pseudohomophone effect, which is considered to be evidence that phonological recoding occurs in the lexical decision task in which a letter string like brane is identified as a nonword. 22 undergraduates read 156 letter strings, half of which were words, and identified them as words or nonwords. Half of the nonwords were pseudohomophones like brane, which sounds like a real word but is not spelled like one; half were strings like slint, which neither looks nor sounds like a real word. Response time to pseudohomophones was slower than response time to other nonwords. The interpretation of this result is that the letter string brane is transformed into a phonological code that accesses the entry for brain in a phonological lexicon, thus necessitating a time-consuming spelling check to avoid making a false positive response. Since letter strings like slint have no lexical entries, a postaccess spelling check is not necessary. Thus, the pseudohomophone effect reflects phonological processing. (French abstract) (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of word linguistic properties on phonological awareness in Spanish children.

We investigated whether some word linguistic properties studied by R. Treiman and S. Weatherston (see record 1992-37025-001) in the English language have the same influence on phonological awareness of preschoolers and kindergartners in the Spanish language. We examined the effects of these word linguistic properties on children's ability to isolate the initial consonant: phoneme articulatory properties, the position of stressed syllables in the words, the presence of initial consonant clusters, and the word length. We found that effects due to word length and the syllable-initial consonant cluster were similar in English and Spanish. In contrast to English-speaking children, the Spanish-speaking children could pronounce the first consonant regardless of the position of the stressed syllable, and continuant consonants were easier to isolate than stop consonants. Implications for the training of phonological awareness in the Spanish language are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory operations that support language comprehension: Evidence from verb-phrase ellipsis.

Comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) requires reevaluation of recently processed constituents, which often necessitates retrieval of information about the elided constituent from memory. A. E. Martin and B. McElree (2008) argued that representations formed during comprehension are content addressable and that VPE antecedents are retrieved from memory via a cue-dependent direct-access pointer rather than via a search process. This hypothesis was further tested by manipulating the location of interfering material—either before the onset of the antecedent (proactive interference; PI) or intervening between antecedent and ellipsis site (retroactive interference; RI). The speed–accuracy tradeoff procedure was used to measure the time course of VPE processing. The location of the interfering material affected VPE comprehension accuracy: RI conditions engendered lower accuracy than PI conditions. Crucially, location did not affect the speed of processing VPE, which is inconsistent with both forward and backward search mechanisms. The observed time-course profiles are consistent with the hypothesis that VPE antecedents are retrieved via a cue-dependent direct-access operation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure of genetic influences on general cognitive, language, phonological, and reading abilities.

The etiology of individual differences in literacy, phonological awareness, and language ability is reported in 126 pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic twins. At age 6 and 7 years, more than 60% of the variance in literacy was heritable. Heritabilities for 6- and 7-year-olds were .52 and .62, respectively, for phonological awareness and .43 and .50, respectively, for language ability. After genetic effects on IQ were controlled, a separate genetic influence was identified that acted on literacy, phonological awareness, and language. No genetic link between phonological awareness and literacy independent of general language ability was found; such covariance was mediated through environmental influences. Individual differences in literacy ability are substantially influenced by genetic factors, some of which also act on phonological awareness and general language ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The activation of phonological representations by bilinguals while reading silently: Evidence from interlingual homophones.

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by French-English bilinguals were significantly faster and more accurate for interlingual homophones than for matched English control words. In subsequent experiments, the homophone facilitation effect in the latency data disappeared when distractors were changed to pseudohomophones, when cognates and interlingual homographs were added to the experiment, and when the proportion of critical stimuli was decreased. However, the homophone effect in the error data remained. In contrast, English-French bilinguals revealed little evidence of an interlingual homophone effect. Several attempts were made to increase the saliency of the nontarget language, however these manipulations produced only a small effect in the error data. These results indicate that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific depending on the proficiency of the bilinguals and whether they are reading in their weaker or stronger language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either...or.

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Utterance format effects phonological priming in the picture-word task: Implications for models of phonological encoding in speech production.

Picture-word experiments investigating the production of multiword utterances with distractors that are phonologically related to words in noninitial position have yielded inconsistent results, ranging from facilitation to inhibition. A comparison of these studies is complicated by differences in detail. In parallel to the empirical inconsistencies, different theoretical accounts of phonological encoding in speech production have been provided. In the present article, the authors propose a unitary account, which can in principle account for facilitation, null effects, and inhibition. It assumes a graded activation pattern of the elements within the scope of phonological advance planning. The account is tested in an experiment varying utterance format while keeping all other aspects constant. The results are consistent with the proposed unitary account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural dependency in language production.

The subjects and verbs of English agree in number. This superficially simple operation is regularly implemented by speakers, but occasionally derails in sentences such as "The time for fun and games are over". Such mistakes are interesting because their systematic deviations from the structural dependencies that govern normal agreement may shed light on how such dependencies are ordinarily implemented in speech. There were two issues at the focus of this work. The first had to do with the nature of the information that is used in carrying out agreement, and the second with the scope of processing operations. The findings from several experiments are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic and phonological codes interact in single word production.

The relationship between semantic–syntactic and phonological levels in speaking was investigated using a picture naming procedure with simultaneously presented visual or auditory distractor words. Previous results with auditory distractors have been used to support the independent stage model (e.g., H. Schriefers, A. S. Meyer, & W. J. M. Levelt, 1990), whereas results with visual distractors have been used to support an interactive view (e.g., P. A. Starreveld & W. La Heij, 1996). Experiment 1 demonstrated that with auditory distractors, semantic effects preceded phonological effects, whereas the reverse pattern held for visual distractors. Experiment 2 indicated that the results for visual distractors followed the auditory pattern when distractor presentation time was limited. Experiment 3 demonstrated an interaction between phonological and semantic relatedness of distractors for auditory presentation, supporting an interactive account of lexical access in speaking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic and phonological activation in noun and pronoun production.

Speakers can refer to objects and other entities by nouns or pronouns. The present article investigated the production of gender-marked pronouns in German. Four picture-word interference experiments are reported, addressing 2 questions. First, is the lemma of a referent noun (i.e., the representation of the referent noun's semantic and syntactic properties) accessed when producing a pronoun? Second, if so, is this access confined to the lemma, or will the referent noun's phonological form be activated, too? The results suggest that in generating pronouns, speakers accessed the lemma of the referent noun, whereas its phonological form was not substantially activated. The results are discussed in the context of other recent experimental studies of pronoun and noun production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic and phonological information flow in the production lexicon.

When speakers produce words, lexical access proceeds through semantic and phonological levels of processing. If phonological processing begins based on partial semantic information, processing is cascaded; otherwise, it is discrete. In standard models of lexical access, semantically processed words exert phonological effects only if processing is cascaded. In 3 experiments, speakers named pictures of objects with homophone names (ball), while auditory distractor words were heard beginning 150 ms prior to picture onset. Distractors speeded picture naming (compared with controls) only when related to the nondepicted meaning of the picture (e.g., dance), exhibiting an early phonological effect, thereby supporting the cascaded prediction. Distractors slowed picture naming when categorically (e.g., frisbee) related to the depicted picture meaning, but not when associatively (e.g., game) related to it. An interactive activation model is presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)