Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the time course of syllabic and sub-syllabic processing in Cantonese spoken word production by using the picture-word interference task. Cantonese-speaking participants were asked to name individually presented pictures aloud and ignore an auditory word distractor. The targets and distractors were either phonologically related (i.e., sharing two identical word-initial phonemes) or unrelated. In Experiment 1, the target syllables were all consonant-vowel (CV)-structured. The phonological distractor was either a CV syllable (i.e., Full Syllable Overlap) or a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) syllable (i.e., Sub-syllable Overlap). Relative to the unrelated control, Full Syllable Overlap distractors facilitated naming in all stimuli onset asynchronies (SOAs) (-175, 0, or +175 ms) whereas Sub-syllable Overlap distractors exhibited facilitation only at 0-ms and +175-ms SOAs. Experiment 2 adopted a similar design to examine the possible influence of syllabic structure similarity on the results of Experiment 1. The target syllables were all CVC-structured. The phonological distractor was either a CVC (i.e., Syllable-structure Consistent) or CV (i.e., Syllable-structure Inconsistent) syllable. Comparable priming was observed between the two distractor conditions across the three SOAs. These results indicated that an earlier priming effect was observed with full syllable overlap than sub-syllabic overlap when the degree of segmental overlap was held constant (Experiment 1). The earlier syllable priming observed in Experiment 1 could not be attributed to the effect of syllabic-structure (Experiment 2), thereby suggesting that the syllable unit is important in Cantonese and is retrieved earlier than sub-syllabic components during phonological encoding.
Highlights
One contentious theoretical issue in the language production literature concerns the nature or size of the phonological unit being retrieved following lexical access, and whether this is language-universal or language-specific [1]
Experiment 1: Syllable vs. sub-syllabic component. This experiment aims at investigating the time course of syllabic and sub-syllabic processing in Cantonese phonological encoding using a picture-word interference (PWI) task while the degree of segmental overlap was manipulated across conditions
Experiment 1 replicated the findings of previous Chinese PWI studies that a significant facilitation effect can be observed when the target and distractor shared the same atonal syllable or syllable body [16, 17, 20]
Summary
One contentious theoretical issue in the language production literature concerns the nature or size of the phonological unit being retrieved following lexical access, and whether this is language-universal or language-specific [1]. It should be noted that in that study, the degree of segmental overlap between target and distractor was higher in the syllable-related condition (mean number of overlapping phonemes = 3.25) than that in the body-related condition (mean number of overlapping phonemes = 2.00). Experiment 2 was designed to examine whether similarity in syllabic structure between target and distractor would have an effect on the present PWI results This experiment aims at investigating the time course of syllabic and sub-syllabic processing in Cantonese phonological encoding using a PWI task while the degree of segmental overlap was manipulated across conditions
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