Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning

Abstract

This document is the Accepted Manuscript Version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, Stephanie Strahm, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Soke word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning', Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 89, August 2016, pp. 55-67, doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.003. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 1 December 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words

Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced

“…Our results were unexpected given the majority of studies in the literature that report a benefit for production. Especially given that when the same experiment was run with adults, a recognition advantage was found for the novel words that are produced over heard during training (Zamuner et al., ). Despite this, our findings are in line with a subset of studies that have found that the production effect can be attenuated or reversed, depending on the linguistic characteristics of the stimuli and potentially the difficulty of the task.…”

“…This design also provided a control for frequency during training because production increases an item's frequency (Abbs et al., ; Hopkins & Edwards, ): produced items were presented twice during training (once from the computer and once by the participants), and heard items were also presented twice (two times by the computer). A similar control for the frequency of presentation was also done in two studies with adults (Zamuner et al., submitted; Zamuner et al., ), and in a study with 5‐year‐olds by Icht and Mama () which used a live experimenter, and on heard trials the items were produced twice by the experimenter.…”

“…Zamuner et al. () suggest that production includes additional articulatory phonetic information, leading to faster word recognition. This account is consistent with a variety of models that incorporate articulatory representations and/or sensory‐motor components, such as exemplar theories (Goldinger, ; Pierrehumbert, ; Sosa & Bybee, ) and more recent neurocognitive models of speech production (Dell, Schwartz, Nozari, Faseyitan, & Coslett, ; Hickok, ).…”

“…Immediately after training, children were tested on their recognition of the novel words using a preferential looking paradigm. This same task was used in a study with adult participants (Zamuner et al., ), who showed better recognition for novel words produced over those heard during training. We predicted that if production enhances children's learning in a similar way, that the same effect would be found.…”

Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development

“…Both in infancy and beyond, studies have shown that word production and use provide a more stable, more reliable, better‐established representation than word recognition or comprehension alone (Icht & Mama, ; MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, & Ozubko, ; Vihman, DePaolis, & Keren‐Portnoy, ; Zamuner, Morin‐Lessard, Strahm, & Page, ). There are many reasons why this should be true, including the greater effort involved in production, which accordingly supports more robust memory or representation (Elbers & Wijnen, ) and the support that a match to a well‐practised production routine affords to the challenge of retaining novel word forms; the matching process, which becomes increasingly accessible as the lexicon grows, constructs or shapes phonological memory (Keren‐Portnoy, Vihman, DePaolis, Whitaker, & Williams, ).…”