The relation between semantics and lexical properties in spoken word production

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated facilitation in speech production when multiple levels are activated. In the present study a time course of facilitation and the contribution of various lexical and semantic properties in facilitating spoken word production was investigated. An experiment was conducted that examined the effects of semantics and lexical properties on acoustic-phonetic duration on spoken word production. Specifically, the primary interest was how duration changed as a function of semantic context and its interaction with the frequency and similarity neighborhood of CVC words. The semantic contexts and targets were presented using a visual naming paradigm. Target words were presented either 100 or 1500 ms after the offset of a simultaneous presentation of a string of three primes. The three primes were either all semantically related to the target, all semantically unrelated to the target, or all nonlinguistic characters neutral to the target. Duration of the target stimuli and reaction times to onset of articulation were measured. The results will be discussed in terms of interactive activation. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD Grant R01 0265801.]