Parallel processing and initial phoneme criterion in naming words: Evidence from frequency effects on onset and rime duration.

Abstract

This study reports 4 experiments that investigated the locus of temporal effects of printed word frequency in speeded-naming tasks. Response latencies and onset durations are shorter for high-frequency words compared with low-frequency words, but there is no effect of frequency on rime durations. These results can only be accounted for if (a) phonemes are activated in parallel and not sequentially from left to right and (b) the criterion to initiate pronunciation is based on the initial phoneme and not the whole word. In addition, the effect of word-initial phoneme characteristics on acoustic latency was investigated. The acoustic latency of words beginning with voiceless sibilants was less than that of words beginning with plosives, a pattern opposite that reported by R. Treiman, J. Mullennix, R. Bijeljac-Babic, and E. E. Richmond-Welty (1995). This difference was attributed to the lower sensitivity of voice keys compared with measures based on digitized responses.

Typing pictures: Linguistic processing cascades into finger movements

“…In single word production, a longer duration of the initial phoneme has been reported for words entailing irregular vowel pronunciation, compared to words with a regular vowel pronunciation (Kawamoto, Kello, Jones, & Bame, 1998). Also, lexical frequency seems to affect initial phoneme durations, but not rhyme durations (Kawamoto, Kello, Higareda, & Vu, 1999; see also Mousikou & Rastle, 2015). Lexical frequency effects have actually been detected in a reading aloud task with delayed responses (Balota & Chumbley, 1985), but this result has been debated (Monsell, Doyle, Haggard, 1989;Balota & Chumbley, 1990).…”

Characterizing the Bilingual Disadvantage in Noun Phrase Production

“…If we assume, based on the frequency-of-use hypothesis, that the frequency values of the words for bilinguals are lower than for monolinguals, we should expect shorter durations for the latter group. 1 Second, some studies have revealed that the ease with which word retrieval is achieved may have an impact not only on the speed with which utterances are initiated (onset latencies) but also on the corresponding articulatory durations (Balota et al 1989;Kawamoto et al 1998Kawamoto et al , 1999Kello et al 2000;Kello 2004 although see Damian, 2003). Hence, given that word retrieval appears to be more costly for bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals, we may expect to find a trace of such difficulty in articulatory durations.…”

Strategic control over rate of processing in word reading: A computational investigation

“…made a connection between response durations and rate of processing on the basis of cascaded articulation. Cascaded articulation is the hypothesis that, under some circumstances, response processing and response execution can overlap in time (also see Kawamoto, Kello, Jones, & Bame, 1998;Kawamoto, Kello, Higareda, & Vu, 1999). If articulation was cascaded in the tempo-naming study, then one would expect a change in the rate of response processing to be reflected in a change in the rate of response execution.…”