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Japanese Psychological Research2015, Volume 57, No. 1, 1–3
Special issue: Speech sounds across languages

doi: 10.1111/jpr.12073

Editorial: The production of speech sounds
across languages

What is the phonological unit
used in speech production?
Speaking comes so effortlessly to us that wesometimes even forget how complicated it is.
We need to go from a thought to planning andproducing our speech. In doing so, we must use
correct grammar, appropriate speech sounds(phonology), and finally use our muscles toadjust the airflow through our speech production system to produce clear utterances. This isespecially remarkable if one considers that thisall happens in a couple of hundred milliseconds.
Although the construction of speech sounds(phonology) as a topic by itself has received
ample consideration in the past, little attention
has been paid so far to whether this process
occurs similarly for each language.
In one of the most cited models of language
production (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), it
was typically assumed that speech sounds areconstructed by incrementally clustering phonemes into syllables. In other words, to build
the sound for the word “dog,” one places theletters /d/, /o/ and /g/ one-by-one in a syllable.
Evidence for this assumption comes fromresearch which made use of the so-called
implicit priming paradigm (Meyer, 1990, 1991;
Roelofs, 1998). These authors showed that forwords that share their initial sounds onset
priming (i.e., facilitation) is observed (e.g.,loner, level, list), but this was not true when
they shared their rime (e.g., murder, ponder,boulder).
In contrast, using the same paradigm, Chen,Chen, and Dell (2002) and O’Seaghdha, Chen,and Chen (2010) showed that overlap smaller
than a syllable (e.g., /ma/ and /mo/) did nothave an effect on speech processing in Mandarin
Chinese. Similarly, in Japanese using implicit
and masked priming paradigms (Kureta,Fushimi, & Tatsumi, 2006; Verdonschot et al.,2011), it was shown that only when minimally amora (e.g., /ka/ but not just /k/) overlapped could
significant priming effects be observed. These
results seem to indicate that the way we construct speech sounds (phonology), or the unit
which is involved in this process, may differ perlanguage.As such, it has become clear that existing models of language production should take
into account differences between languages. In
addition, there are still many outstanding questions, such as whether bi- or multilingual speakers would have different units for each of theirlanguages or whether, for instance, the smallest
unit would always prevail. This special issue ofJapanese Psychological Research showcases
several high-quality empirical studies and twocomprehensive reviews in order to encourage
the debate on how phonology is built across theworld’s languages.

Highlights of the articles
This special issue starts out with a comprehensive review and interpretation of the existing
literature by Padraigh O’Séaghdha (2015),including recent developments such as the “sustained attention view” (O’Séaghdha & Frazer,2014). He also concisely summarizes and interprets the significance of several of the articles
found in this special issue. This article provides
an excellent start for those who are unfamiliar
with the topic, as well as in-depth information
for those who are familiar with it. Subsequently,*Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to: Rinus G. Verdonschot, Graduate School ofLanguages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. (E-mail:rinusverdonschot@gmail.com)© 2015 Japanese Psychological Association. Published by Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

2R. G. Verdonschot and K. Tamaoka

five empirical research papers, which include
exciting new data, are presented.
Wong and Chen (2015), using a picture-wordinterference task, showed subsyllabic primingfor Cantonese Chinese when the picture nameand the distracter shared more than one identical phonemic segment (regardless of the placeof overlap). Additionally, they found that theeffect was larger when the tone also overlapped
between the picture and the distracter’s name.
Similarly, using a masked priming paradigm,
Verdonschot, Lai, Chen, Tamaoka, and Schiller(2015) also obtained subsyllabic priming
for Mandarin Chinese (i.e., when onset + vowel
were shared between prime and target).
However, for both studies (i.e., Cantonese andMandarin) pure onset overlap did not yield reliable facilitation.
On another note, Chen and Chen (2015)sought to investigate whether the “domain”
of planning was different between IndoEuropean languages (e.g., English) and Mandarin Chinese. Recently, it has been (tentatively)
found that the “domain” concerning phonological planning for English compound words
would pertain to the whole word and not to its
constituents (Jacobs & Dell, 2012). In thisspecial issue, Chen and Chen similarly investigated whether multimorphemic Mandarin
Chinese compound words are processed as awhole or whether preparation benefits could
occur for compound words’ constituents. Using
an implicit priming paradigm in which participants were cued to say the second part of adisyllabic word, such as “jie” in: /lian2jie1/,/qiang3jie2/, /chai1jie3/, /zu1jie4/, Chen andChen (2015) found preparation benefits
indicating that each morpheme of amultimorphemic word may constitute a newstarting point for phonological planning in
Mandarin Chinese.
Concerning Japanese, Kureta, Fushimi,
Sakuma, and Tatsumi (2015) investigatedwhether the particular type of script used inexperimental setups may play an importantrole. In three experiments using the word-form
preparation paradigm, they found that onset
preparation is obtained neither when stimuli
are presented in typical (nonsegmental) Japa© Japanese Psychological Association 2015.

nese scripts (e.g., kanji and kana) nor when
they are auditorily presented. However, whenstimuli were transcribed into romanized Japanese (romaji) in the prompt-response learning
phase a significant phoneme preparation effectwas obtained, indicating that script does play animportant role in the specific linkage between
orthography and phonology.
Next, as it has previously been found thathigh-proficient Mandarin Chinese-English
bilinguals show onset priming in their L2 andunder specific conditions also in their L1(Verdonschot, Nakayama, Zhang, Tamaoka, &Schiller, 2013), Ida, Nakayama, and Lupker(2015) investigated whether these results would
also hold for high-proficient Japanese-English
bilinguals. In two masked priming experiments
Ida et al. found onset priming effects for participants’ L2 (English), but no hint of onset
priming for stimuli presented in participants’
L1 (Japanese) except for a small effect in theerror rates, which suggests that within typicalJapanese word processing the native “mora”
unit is used, even though these bilinguals werehighly proficient in an alphabetic language suchas English.
Lastly, Ardi Roelofs (2015) takes us on a
grand tour through the route that phonologicalencoding in spoken word production takes
according to the well-known Levelt et al. (1999)
model of language production. He also points
out how empirical data obtained from a varietyof languages (ranging from Germanic languages
to Chinese and Japanese) can be explainedby the model, and additionally shows how
novel computer simulations by WEAVER++(for an introductory explanation concerning
WEAVER++ in Japanese see Tamaoka, 2013)
can account for the model’s ability to encompass
a large variety of different languages.

Conclusion
We believe that this special issue greatly influences and extends the ongoing debate on how
phonology is constructed across the world’s languages and we thank all authors for their generous and excellent contributions to this special
issue.

Editorial

RINUS G. VERDONSCHOT* andKATSUO TAMAOKA1
Nagoya University

References
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1
Katsuo Tamaoka, Graduate School of Languages
and Cultures, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusaku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. (Email: ktamaoka@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp)© Japanese Psychological Association 2015.