Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjectivenoun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers treated the compounds as single prosodic units, indistinguishable from simple words, with RT data statistically different than that of the adjective-noun phrases. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that compounds are also treated as single prosodic units in utterances containing clitics (e.g., dishcloths are clean) as they incorporate the verb into a single phonological word (i.e. dishcloths-are). Taken together, these results suggest that English compounds are planned as single recursive prosodic units. Our data require an adaptation of the classic model of phonological encoding to incorporate a distinction between lexical and postlexical prosodic processes, such that lexical boundaries have consequences for post-lexical phonological encoding.

No abstract

No abstract

Models of bilingual language production (e.g. Roelofs and Verhoef 2006) assume activation of the native language (L1) during speech. This assumption is tied to evidence from psycholinguistic tasks where non-native speakers regularly exhibit the cost of speaking in the non-dominant language. One of the most obvious signs of a non-native (L2) English speaker is incorrect stress assignment in polysyllabic words. This phenomenon has often been ascribed to interference from the L1 metrical structure on the construction of L2 word frames (cf. Archibald 1993(cf. Archibald , 1997. A major claim of L2 production models is that a word's prosodic and segmental components are activated separately. If this is true, then errors in stress assignment should not interfere with the construction of L2 word frames. This study presents a series of psycholinguistic experiments designed to test the production of complex constructions in English by fluent speakers of a language with similar compounding strategies but different word stress: Bengali. Over the course of these experiments, we found evidence that the planning unit for both complex and simple words retained a prosodic shape in non-native speakers of English. Furthermore, we found that native Bengali speakers, despite difficulties in assigning correct stress, were able to distinguish between compounds and phrases across all four experiments. Specifically, they were able to access the prosodic shapes of both complex structures despite errors in stress assignments. These findings support models of phonological encoding in which post-lexical information is prepared during separate subprocesses and suggest that the learnability of complex structures such as compounds in English involves the distinct preparation of prosodic and segmental components.

No abstract