The influence of onset-density in speech production

Abstract

Numerous studies have suggested that the initial phoneme (or syllable onset) plays an important role in speech perception and production. Recent findings have also demonstrated the importance that the number of similar sounding words plays in lexical retrieval during speech perception and production. The results from a picture-naming task demonstrate that the number of words that share the onset of the target word (onset-density) also influences speech production as well as speech perception. Specifically, pictures of words with sparse onsets were named more quickly than pictures of words with dense onsets. These results suggest that lexical and sublexical information interact during lexical retrieval in speech production. The implications for feedforward and feedback models of speech production will be discussed.