Primary phonological planning units in spoken word production are language-specific: Evidence from an ERP study

Jie Wang,Suiping Wang,Hsuan-Chih Chen,Andus Wing-Kuen Wong

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-06186-z

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged in Germanic languages that segments are the primary planning units at the phonological encoding stage of spoken word production. Mixed results, however, have been found in Chinese, and it is still unclear what roles syllables and segments play in planning Chinese spoken word production. In the current study, participants were asked to first prepare and later produce disyllabic Mandarin words upon picture prompts and a response cue while electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded. Each two consecutive pictures implicitly formed a pair of prime and target, whose names shared the same word-initial atonal syllable or the same word-initial segments, or were unrelated in the control conditions. Only syllable repetition induced significant effects on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) after target onset: a widely distributed positivity in the 200- to 400-ms interval and an anterior positivity in the 400- to 600-ms interval. We interpret these to reflect syllable-size representations at the phonological encoding and phonetic encoding stages. Our results provide the first electrophysiological evidence for the distinct role of syllables in producing Mandarin spoken words, supporting a language specificity hypothesis about the primary phonological units in spoken word production.

Highlights

As the most distinguished ability of human beings, language cognition has been of great interest to many researchers for a long time
The first assumes that atonal syllables are the proximate phonological units in Chinese, and that the sub-syllabic effects may result from repeated segment retrieval in the segmental specification process following the selection of syllables
In the study of Qu and colleagues[24], participants were asked to produce colour-noun phrases upon picture prompts. They found that onset repetition between the colour name and the noun generated no behavioural differences but significantly modulated the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in the 200- to 300-ms interval and the 300- to 400-ms interval after picture onset. In another picture naming task where each two consecutive pictures implicitly formed a pair of prime and target, onset repetition between the prime and the target induced similar ERP effects after target onset[26]

Summary

Introduction

As the most distinguished ability of human beings, language cognition has been of great interest to many researchers for a long time. Researchers have found robust effects of sharing atonal syllables in Chinese spoken word production[9,10,11,12, 15,16,17,18,19,20] To account for this discrepancy, O’Seaghdha and colleagues[9] proposed that the primary phonological units below the word level (called the proximate units, e.g., segments in English, atonal syllables in Chinese) are language-specific and that the above behavioural effects originate from participants’ intentional preparation of these proximate units. It is important and useful to compare the ERP effect of syllable repetition with that of segment repetition for verifying the proximate phonological units in Chinese spoken word production

Methods

Results

Conclusion