Phonological Encoding in Word Naming and Word Typing

Phonological Encoding in Word Naming and Word Typing Jenn-Yeu Chen (psyjyc@mail.ncku.edu.tw) Institute of Cognitive Science, National Cheng Kung University 1 University Road, Tainan City, Taiwan 701 Cheng-Yi Li (adamli100@gmail.com) Institute of Cognitive Science, National Cheng Kung University 1 University Road, Tainan City, Taiwan 701 Abstract The process of phonological encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word, which correspond roughly to the onset and the rhyme of the word’s syllable. Regardless of SOAs, response times were shorter in the related condition than in the unrelated condition (an onset priming effect) for word typing, but were similar for word naming. The results suggest that naming and typing in Chinese may involve somewhat different phonological encoding processes even though both tasks require accessing the phonological codes. It is hypothesized that phonological encoding in Chinese is syllable driven in word naming, but is segment driven in word typing. with retrieving the segmental contents and the wordshape frame of the word to be produced. The segments are then assigned to the slots in the wordshape frame sequentially from left to right according to the phonotactic principles of the language. The result of this segment-to-frame association (called syllabification) is phonological syllables, which are fed to the next stage of processing for phonetic encoding and articulation. In this model (illustrated in Figure 3), the syllables are assembled products of phonological encoding. The model was solely based on empirical evidence from Indo-European languages such as English, Dutch, and German. Content Network Structure Network peach Concept Keywords: Naming, Typing; Phonological Encoding; Word Production. Word-shape Frame peach Word Introduction The organization of a production system, natural or artifactual, must be constrained by the kind of outputs it is designed to produce. The production system for a car is organized differently than the production system for an airplane. The production systems for different kinds of cars (sedan vs. truck) are probably also organized differently. For natural languages, it has been shown recently that the word form encoding component of the word production system is organized differently for different languages such as Dutch and Chinese. In the present study, we show that the process of phonological encoding in word production is also somewhat different for naming and typing within the same language, Chinese, even though both tasks involve accessing phonological codes. The phonological codes of a word may contain the syllables (e.g., /seg/ and /ment/ for the word ‘segment’), the individual segments (e.g., /s, e, g, m, ə, n, t/) and the prosodic features (the stress pattern ‘σσ) of the word. Theories of word production vary in whether the syllables are hypothesized as stored and retrieved units (Dell, 1986; Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996; Santiago, MacKay, Palma, & Rho, 2000), or whether they are assembled online during phonological encoding (Levelt, Meyer, & Roelofs, 1999). According to the model proposed by Levelt and colleagues (the LMR model), phonological encoding starts Segments /i/ /p/ /ch/ onset nucleus coda Motor Programs Figure 3: Production of an English CVC monosyllable for naming. Arrows signify activation. Button terminals signify assignment of contents to structures. Assuming a similar architecture to the LMR model, Chen and colleagues (Chen, Dell, & Chen, 2002; O’Seaghdha, Chen & Chen, 2010) examined Mandarin Chinese recently but proposed that phonological encoding starts with retrieving the stored syllables of the word. The segmental contents and the syllable frame of each syllable are then retrieved for the same kind of segment-to-frame association process as in the LMR model. The difference between the LMR model (Figure 3) and the Chinese model (illustrated in Figure 4) can be characterized as the difference between segment-driven and syllable-driven processes. The difference, as we maintained previously, is due to the