Katharina Spalek

Is lexical selection in spoken word production competitive? Introduction to the special issue on lexical competition in language production

A common assumption in research on spoken word production is that lexical selection is a competition-based process among co-activated lexical representations. This assumption of competitive lexical selection has been challenged by an alternative account, which places competition at a postlexical response selection stage. A complex pattern of empirical findings from picture-word interference and other tasks has emerged which constrains current thinking about word production. In this article we provide an overview over the main positions, empirical findings, and put the various contributions to this Special Issue into a wider context. The theoretical debate is far from closed, but it has drawn attention to some critical points that we emphasise in this Editorial: The speech production process needs an element of competition, but this competition need not necessarily take place during lexical selection. Behavioural interference effects are caused by a combination of facilitation and interference, but there is discord about the processing levels at which these mechanisms are located. Finally, we stress the necessity to use findings from different experimental paradigms for theory-building and advocate a shift from the narrow focus on the picture-word paradigm that has dominated the theoretical discussion in this Special Issue and elsewhere.

Does word length affect speech onset latencies when producing single words

Most models of spoken production predict that shorter utterances should be initiated faster than longer ones. However, whether word-length effects in single word production exist is at present controversial. A series of experiments did not find evidence for such an effect. First, an experimental manipulation of word length in picture naming showed no latency differences. Second, Dutch and English speakers named 2 sets of either objects or words (monosyllabic names in Dutch and disyllabic names in English or vice versa). A length effect, which should manifest itself as an interaction between object set and response language, emerged in word naming but not in picture naming. Third, distractors consisting of the final syllable of disyllabic object names speeded up responses, but at the same time, no word-length effect was found. These results suggest that before the response is initiated, an entire word has been phonologically encoded, but only its initial syllable is placed in an articulatory buffer.

Distractor frequency effects in picture–word interference tasks with vocal and manual responses

A number of studies have recently reported that in picture–word interference (PWI) tasks, distractors with a low frequency of occurrence interfere more with picture naming than distractors with high-frequency. This finding is not straightforward to accommodate within traditional accounts of word production in which lexical access is typically conceptualised as competitive. Instead, the distractor frequency effect has been taken to support a view according to which lexical access is not competitive, and PWI effects arise at a postlexical preparation stage. Two experiments are reported which contrasted picture naming with a manual task performed on the picture name (Experiment 1: syllable judgment; Experiment 2: phoneme monitoring). In both studies, an equivalent effect of distractor frequency was observed for vocal and manual tasks, suggesting that the effect arises at a shared, abstract processing level. Consequently, the distractor frequency effect should not be interpreted as evidence for the claim that distractors have to be excluded from an articulatory response buffer before target naming can proceed.

Interplay of bigram frequency and orthographic neighborhood statistics in language membership decision

Language-specific orthography (i.e., letters or bigrams that exist in only one language) is known to facilitate language membership recognition. Yet the contribution of continuous sublexical and lexical statistics to language membership decisions during visual word processing is unknown. Here, we used pseudo-words to investigate whether continuous sublexical and lexical statistics bias explicit language decisions (Experiment 1) and language attribution during naming (Experiment 2). We also asked whether continuous statistics would have an effect in the presence of orthographic markers. Language attribution in both experiments was influenced by lexical neighborhood size differences between languages, even in presence of orthographic markers. Sublexical frequencies of occurrence affected reaction times only for unmarked pseudo-words in both experiments, with greater effects in naming. Our results indicate that bilinguals rely on continuous language-specific statistics at sublexical and lexical levels to infer language membership. Implications are discussed with respect to models of bilingual visual word recognition.

Context updating during sentence comprehension: The effect of aboutness topic

To communicate efficiently, speakers typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and adapt their utterances to the listeners discourse representation. Information structure describes how linguistic information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. The present study investigates the nature and time course of context integration (i.e., aboutness topic vs. neutral context) on the comprehension of German declarative sentences with either subject-before-object (SO) or object-before-subject (OS) word order using offline comprehensibility judgments and online event-related potentials (ERPs). Comprehensibility judgments revealed that the topic context selectively facilitated comprehension of stories containing OS (i.e., non-canonical) sentences. In the ERPs, the topic context effect was reflected in a less pronounced late positivity at the sentence-initial object. In line with the Syntax-Discourse Model, we argue that these context-induced effects are attributable to reduced processing costs for updating the current discourse model. The results support recent approaches of neurocognitive models of discourse processing.

Phonological Regularities and Grammatical Gender Retrieval in Spoken Word Recognition and Word Production

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun’s phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun’s gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected. The noun stimuli could either belong to the gender class predicted by their ending (congruent) or they could belong to the gender class that was different from the predicted gender (incongruent). Gender decisions were made significantly faster for congruent nouns than for incongruent nouns, relative to a (lexical decision) baseline task. In Experiment 2, participants named pictures of the same materials as used in Experiment 1 with noun phrases consisting of a gender-marked determiner, a gender-marked adjective and a noun. In this Experiment, no effect of congruency, relative to a (bare noun naming) baseline task, was observed. Thus, the results show an effect of phonological information on the retrieval of gender-marked elements in spoken word recognition, but not in word production.

A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English

The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner variant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of opposing determiner forms by a nouns grammatical properties leads to slower naming latencies in a picture naming task, as does the activation of opposing forms by the interaction between a nouns gender and the phonological context. The present paper addresses the question of whether phonological context alone is sufficient to evoke competition between determiner forms. Participants produced English phrases in which a noun phrases phonology required a determiner that was the same as or differed from the determiner required by the noun itself (e.g., apurple giraffe; an orange giraffe). Naming latencies were slower when the phrase-initial determiner differed from the determiner required by the noun in isolation than when the phrase-initial determiner matched the isolated-noun determiner. This was true both for definite and indefinite determiners. The data show that during the production of a determiner-noun phrase, nouns automatically activate the phonological forms of their determiners, which can compete with the phonological forms that are generated by an assimilation rule.

The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

ABSTRACT Morphophonology influences subject–verb agreement in a wide variety of languages. Dominant models of agreement production [e.g. Marking and Morphing, Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, J. K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.531 Competition models, Mirković, J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2013). When singular and plural are both grammatical: Semantic and morphophonological effects in agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 277–298. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.05.001 posit explanations for morphophonological effects that depend on ambiguity. The present study uses sentence completion tasks in Dutch (Experiment 1) and German (Experiment 2) that manipulate notional number and grammatical gender with conjoined noun phrases to investigate how morphophonology affects number agreement. Results show that speakers of both languages produced more singular agreement with items construed as more notionally singular, and with items containing two nouns with the same grammatical gender, even though, prima facie, grammatical gender should be irrelevant for subject–verb number agreement in these languages. Experiment 2 showed that the grammatical gender effect was not driven by morphophonological ambiguity. These results provide novel insight into how morphophonology, via cue-based retrieval, can affect subject–verb number agreement.

Listening to puns elicits the co-activation of alternative homophone meanings during language production

Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on the co-activation of unrelated meanings of homophones in a subsequent language production task. In a picture-word interference paradigm with word distractors that were semantically related or unrelated to the non-depicted meanings of homophones we found facilitation induced by related words only when participants listened to puns before object naming, but not when they heard jokes with unambiguous linguistic stimuli. This finding suggests that a semantic processing mode of ambiguity perception can induce the co-activation of alternative homophone meanings during speech planning.

Activation patterns throughout the word processing network of l1-dominant bilinguals reflect language similarity and language decisions

A crucial aspect of bilingual communication is the ability to identify the language of an input. Yet, the neural and cognitive basis of this ability is largely unknown. Moreover, it cannot be easily incorporated into neuronal models of bilingualism, which posit that bilinguals rely on the same neural substrates for both languages and concurrently activate them even in monolingual settings. Here we hypothesized that bilinguals can employ language-specific sublexical (bigram frequency) and lexical (orthographic neighborhood size) statistics for language recognition. Moreover, we investigated the neural networks representing language-specific statistics and hypothesized that language identity is encoded in distributed activation patterns within these networks. To this end, German–English bilinguals made speeded language decisions on visually presented pseudowords during fMRI. Language attribution followed lexical neighborhood sizes both in first (L1) and second (L2) language. RTs revealed an overall tuning to L1 bigram statistics. Neuroimaging results demonstrated tuning to L1 statistics at sublexical (occipital lobe) and phonological (temporoparietal lobe) levels, whereas neural activation in the angular gyri reflected sensitivity to lexical similarity to both languages. Analysis of distributed activation patterns reflected language attribution as early as in the ventral stream of visual processing. We conclude that in language-ambiguous contexts visual word processing is dominated by L1 statistical structure at sublexical orthographic and phonological levels, whereas lexical search is determined by the structure of both languages. Moreover, our results demonstrate that language identity modulates distributed activation patterns throughout the reading network, providing a key to language identity representations within this shared network.