The effect of masked syllable primes on word and picture naming

Abstract

The role of the syllable in Dutch speech production is investigated. Four experiments tested the effect of masked syllable primes on the naming latencies of words and pictures. Target words were bisyllabic Dutch nouns that either had clear syllable boundaries and began with a CV syllable (e.g., fa.kir ‘‘id.’’) or a CVC syllable (e.g., fak.tor ‘‘factor’’), or their syllable boundary was ambiguous, in which case they began with a CV[C] syllable (e.g., fa[kk]el ‘‘torch’’). In the syllable match condition, targets were preceded by syllable primes that were identical to the first syllable. In the syllable mismatch condition, the syllable prime was one segment shorter or longer than the target word’s first syllable. A neutral condition was designed to determine the direction of the priming effects (facilitation or inhibition). All related primes facilitated the naming of the targets significantly, but the priming effect was independent of the syllabic structure of prime and target. It is concluded that the syllable does not play a functional role in the process of phonological encoding in Dutch. Since the size of the facilitation effect increased with increasing overlap between prime and target, the priming effect is accounted for by a segmental overlap hypothesis.