Effects of Pronounceability and Articulatory Suppression on Phonological Learning

Abstract

The effects of pronounceability and articulatory suppression on learning for the phonology of new vocabulary were studied, The 10 subjects remembered lists of either Japanese words or nonwords. All lists had 20 items; 10 of these were easy to pronounce and the rest were difficult to pronounce. The lists had to be remembered under two conditions, a silent control condition in which only the memory task was required and an articulatory suppression condition in which subjects were required to articulate continuously “1, 2, 3.” Analysis showed the advantage of recall performance for the easy items over that for the difficult ones in the control condition with the nonword lists. This effect of pronounceability disappeared under the condition of the articulatory suppression. These results were discussed in terms of phonological working memory and long-term phonological representation.