Abstract
The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the number of lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture–word interference paradigm, I found in two separate experiments a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like “He opens the gate.” I also altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. That phonological information for post-verbal elements was activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb does not restrict the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that the phonological phrase is unit of planning, where all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Thus, consistent with other action sequencing behavior, there is significant phonological planning ahead in sentence production.
Highlights
The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production
Experiment 2 demonstrates that participants are faster to produce sentences with high-frequency direct objects compared to sentences with low-frequency direct objects
When I discarded the items named and rated poorly from Experiment 2 the phonological facilitation effect was significant both in the subject and item analyses [17 ms; F 1(1, 27) = 7.21, MSE = 80040, p = 0.01; F 2(1, 23) = 4.00, MSE = 64631, p = 0.05]. This suggests that the phonological facilitation effect in sentence naming is a true effect, showing that the direct object noun phrase (NP) was phonologically encoded before articulation
Summary
The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. That phonological information for post-verbal elements was activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb does not restrict the extent of phonological planning These results suggest that the phonological phrase is unit of planning, where all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Following evidence for other behaviors that require the sequencing of actions like motor planning (Rosenbaum, 2010) and problem solving (Catrambone, 1998), these results suggest that planning in sentence production is not incremental, but encompasses larger chunks of information. In one of the most fully articulated models of speech production, Levelt (1989) proposed that grammatical and phonological encoding is highly incremental in order to facilitate fluent speech: “Each processing component will be triggered into activity by a minimal amount of its characteristic input” Because [gAte] receives stress (stress indicated by capitalized vowels), it is a PW when produced alone and when combined with a non-stressed
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