Phonological Neighborhood Density in Native and Non-Native Word Production

Phonological Neighborhood Density in Native and Non-Native Word Production Henrike K. Blumenfeld (k-blumenfeld@northwestern.edu) Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 USA Viorica Marian (v-marian@northwestern.edu) Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 USA in lexical access during language production in native and non-native speakers. Abstract The role of phonological neighborhood density in lexical access was examined during native- and non- native language production. German-English and English-German bilinguals named pictures of German words with high- and low-density neighborhoods. Results revealed that accuracy of picture naming was influenced by phonological neighborhood, with high-density neighborhoods facilitating lexical access in both the native and the non-native languages. However, latency of picture naming was facilitated by high-density phonological neighborhoods only in the non-native, but not the native, language. This suggests that native / non- native language status mediates the effect of phonological neighborhood on the speed of lexical access. Implications for native and non-native language processing dynamics are discussed. Neighborhood Density in Word Production In monolingual language production, activation of phonological representations similar to the target has been found to facilitate word access. For example, phonologically similar words have been found to facilitate naming during picture-word interference tasks (e.g., Costa & Sebastian-Galles, 1998). In studies focusing on tip-of- the-tongue (TOT) states, Meyer and Bock (1992) showed that priming with a phonologically similar word facilitated correct retrieval. Correspondingly, when phonological similarity was manipulated by varying neighborhood density, high-neighborhood targets have been found to produce fewer TOTs than low- neighborhood targets (e.g., Vitevitch & Sommers, 2003). Similar error patterns have also been observed in naturally-produced speech (Vitevitch, 1997). In picture naming tasks, targets with dense phonological neighborhoods have been found to be retrieved faster than targets with sparse phonological neighborhoods (e.g., Vitevitch, 2002). In sum, phonological similarity has consistently been found to facilitate monolingual lexical access across language production tasks (e.g., picture naming, picture-word interference, TOT-elicitation, naturally-produced speech). Neighborhood facilitation during word production has been ascribed to interactive feedback between lexical and phonological processing levels. Gordon and Dell (2001) simulated behavioral findings of neighborhood effects within the framework of an Interactive Spreading Activation Model of production (Dell, 1986). The model was based on three stages of language production: a semantic stage where word-meaning is chosen, a lemma stage where other lexical characteristics are identified, and a phonological stage where the word form is accessed. Simulations suggested that neighborhood facilitation in production is due to feedback between the lemma level and the phonological level during word selection. The lemma activates phonological representations, which in turn activate similar-sounding lemmas (i.e., the phonological neighborhood) that feed back onto the target’s phonological representations and increase their activation levels, facilitating their selection. Keywords: Language Processing; Bilingualism Introduction How alike are the mechanisms underlying native and non- native language processing? This question was examined by manipulating word similarity during native and non- native naming. Similarity and difference among words can be examined at the phonological, orthographic, lexical, and semantic levels. For example, the size of a word’s semantic network influences how fast the word can be accessed, with words that have larger semantic similarity neighborhoods processed faster than words with smaller semantic neighborhoods (e.g., Locker, Simpson, & Yates, 2003). In the same way, the size of a word’s phonological or orthographic neighborhood influences word access. A phonological neighbor is a word that differs from the target word by a single phoneme (Grainger, Muneaux, Farioli, & Ziegler, 2005; Yates, Locker, & Simpson, 2004). A word’s neighborhood size, also referred to as its neighborhood density, is the number of items that are highly similar to it. While phonology, orthography, and semantics are all subject to neighborhood density effects, with implications for lexical activation, the objective of the present study was to examine the role of phonological neighborhood density