Jörg D. Jescheniak

Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form

In 7 experiments the authors investigated the locus of word frequency effects in speech production. Experiment 1 demonstrated a frequency effect in picture naming that was robust over repetitions. Experiments 2, 3, and 7 excluded contributions from object identification and initiation of articulation. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated whether the effect arises in accessing the syntactic word (lemma) by using a grammatical gender decision task. Although a frequency effect was found, it dissipated under repeated access to a words gender. Experiment 6 tested whether the robust frequency effect arises in accessing the phonological form (lexeme) by having Ss translate words that produced homophones. Low-frequent homophones behaved like high-frequent controls, inheriting the accessing speed of their high-frequent homophone twins. Because homophones share the lexeme, not the lemma, this suggests a lexeme-level origin of the robust effect.

What’s left if the Jabberwock gets the semantics? An ERP investigation into semantic and syntactic processes during auditory sentence comprehension

This study examined auditory ERP responses to syntactic phrase structure violations occurring either in sentences containing regular words or in sentences in which content words had been replaced by pseudowords while retaining morphological markers (so-called jabberwocky sentences). Syntactic violations were found to elicit an early anterior negativity followed by a P600 for both types of sentences, suggesting that the syntactic processes in question are independent of the presence of lexical-semantic information. In syntactically correct sentences, content words in regular sentences elicited an N400 component while their pseudoword place-holders in jabberwocky sentences did not. By contrast, in syntactically incorrect sentences neither sentence type showed an N400 for the word creating the syntactic violation, indicating that the detection of a syntactic error at an early stage blocks semantic integration processes in regular sentences. We discuss these results and findings from related studies in the light of a timing hypothesis of syntactic and semantic information processing and propose that syntactic information extracted particularly early can affect semantic processes while syntactic information extracted relatively late cannot.

Exploring the Activation of Semantic and Phonological Codes during Speech Planning with Event-Related Brain Potentials

We present a new technique for studying the activation of semantic and phonological codes in speech planning using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that extend a well-established behavioral procedure from speech production research. It combines a delayed picture-naming task with a priming procedure. While participants prepared the production of a depicted objects name, they heard an auditory target word. If the prepared picture name and the target word were semantically or phonologically related, the ERP waveform to the target word tended less towards the negative when compared to an unrelated control. These effects were widely distributed. By contrast, if participants performed a nonlinguistic task on the depicted object (natural size judgment), the semantic effect was still obtained while the phonological effect disappeared. This suggests that the former effect indexes semantic activation involved in object processing while the latter effect indexes word-form activation specific to lexical processing. The data are discussed in the context of models of lexical access in speech production.

Representation and Processing of Grammatical Gender in Language Production: A Review

The article reviews recent empirical evidence on the representation and processing of grammatical gender in language production. The evidence comes from experimental studies on error-free production, studies on the tip-of-the tongue phenomenon, and studies on naturally occurring or experimentally elicited speech errors. Relating these studies to current models of language production does not yield one completely consistent picture. However, the emerging picture puts some important constraints on models of language production.

Specific-Word Frequency Is Not All That Counts in Speech Production: Comments on Caramazza, Costa, et al. (2001) and New Experimental Data

A. Caramazza, A. Costa, M. Miozzo, and Y. Bi (2001) reported a series of experiments demonstrating that the ease of producing a word depends only on the frequency of that specific word but not on the frequency of a homophone twin. A. Caramazza, A. Costa, et al. concluded that homophones have separate word form presentations and that the absence of frequency-inheritance effects for homophones undermines an important argument in support of 2-stage models of lexical access, which assume that syntactic (lemma) representations mediate between conceptual and phonological representations. The authors of this article evaluate the empirical basis of this conclusion, report 2 experiments demonstrating a frequency-inheritance effect, and discuss other recent evidence. It is concluded that homophones share a common word form and that the distinction between lemmas and word forms should be upheld.

Priming effects from phonologically related distractors in picture-word interference

In the cross-modal picture-word interference task, distractors phonologically related to a to-benamed picture facilitate the naming response as compared to unrelated distractors. Our experiment shows that this phonological priming effect can be obtained with as early an SOA as-300 ms. The experiment also demonstrates that this priming effect cannot be attributed to strategic behaviour of the participants as opposed to automatic preactivation processes in the lexical-conceptual system. The implications for studies using the picture-word interference task as a tool for investigating lexicalization processes in speech production are discussed.

Determiner Selection in Noun Phrase Production

In 3 experiments, native speakers of German named pictures of 1 or 2 objects by producing singular or plural noun phrases consisting of a definite gender-marked determiner and a noun. When singular and plural determiners differed (masculine and neuter gender), naming latencies were longer for plural utterances than for singular utterances. By contrast, when singular and plural determiners were identical (feminine gender), no such effect was obtained. When participants produced bare nouns, the Gender x Number interaction disappeared. This pattern indicates that during the production of plural definite-determiner noun phrases, singular and plural determiners compete for selection. The resulting constraints on number and gender processing in noun phrase production are discussed in the framework of models of language production.

Semantic Competition between Hierarchically Related Words during Speech Planning

There is overwhelming evidence that during speech planning semantically related words become lexically activated and compete for selection with the to-be-produced target word. The vast majority of this evidence stems from studies using the picture-word task, in which a distractor word (e.g.,bird) drawn from the same semantic category as the target (e.g.,fish) was shown to inhibit the picture-naming response more strongly than did an unrelated distractor word. By contrast, corresponding evidence from distractor words (e.g.,carp) bearing a hierarchical relation to the target (e.g.,fish) is sparse and inconclusive. In the present study, we investigated effects of subordinate-level distractors during basiclevel naming and effects of basic-level distractors during subordinate-level naming. Hierarchically related distractors were found to inhibit the naming response in both situations. This pattern of results did not depend on whether the pictures were preferably named at the basic level or at the subordinate level. The results suggest that hierarchically related name alternatives compete for selection.

Utterance format affects 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.

Information flow in the mental lexicon during speech planning: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

A major issue in speech production research is the question of how speakers retrieve words from the so-called mental lexicon. Current models of lexical retrieval converge on the assumption that category associates of a target word are semantically activated during speech planning. However, the question of whether these competitors are also phonologically activated is less agreed on. Past research has addressed this issue by testing whether lexical retrieval of a picture name (e.g. sheep) affects, or is affected by, the processing of a word that is phonologically related to a semantic category associate to the picture name (e.g. goal, phonologically related to goat). Behavioral studies have failed to obtain such so-called mediated priming effects, but have been questioned on the grounds of possibly insufficient task sensitivity. As such priming effects have reliably been obtained with event-related brain potentials in word recognition, we used this approach for testing these effects in lexical retrieval during speech planning. Our results consistently demonstrate the absence of mediated priming effects, putting strong constraints on the activation flow in the mental lexicon during speech planning.