Phonological Activation Research Articles

Automatic Phonological Activation When Reading Japanese Kanji Words

Automatic Phonological Activation When Reading Japanese Kanji Words

Phonological processing dynamics in bilingual word naming.

The current study investigated phonological processing dynamics in bilingual word naming. English-French and French-English bilinguals named interlingual heterophonic homographs (i.e., words that share orthography but not meaning or pronunciation across languages), heterophonic cognates (i.e., words that share both orthography and meaning across languages, but not pronunciations), interlingual homophones (i.e., words that share pronunciation, but not orthography or meaning across languages), and single-language matched control words in both English and French naming tasks. Cross-language phonological activation was strongest in bilinguals' second language. The results provided evidence for feedforward activation of phonological representations in the nontarget language, as well as feedback activation of these phonological representations from semantic representations. Results are interpreted within the more recent Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) framework.

Neural correlates reveal sub-lexical orthography and phonology during reading aloud: a review.

The sub-lexical conversion of graphemes-to-phonemes (GPC) during reading has been investigated extensively with behavioral measures, as well as event-related potentials (ERPs). Most research utilizes silent reading (e.g., lexical decision task) for which phonological activation is not a necessity. However, recent research employed reading aloud to capture sub-lexical GPC. The masked priming paradigm avoids strategic processing and is therefore well suitable for capturing sub-lexical processing instead of lexical effects. By employing ERPs, the on-line time course of sub-lexical GPC can be observed before the overt response. ERPs have revealed that besides phonological activation, as revealed by behavioral studies, there is also early orthographic activation. This review describes studies in one’s native language, in one’s second language, and in a cross-language situation. We discuss the implications the ERP results have on different (computational) models. First, the ERP results show that computational models should assume an early locus of the GPC. Second, cross-language studies reveal that the phonological representations from both languages of a bilingual become activated automatically and the phonology belonging to the context is selected rapidly. Therefore, it is important to extend the scope of computational models of reading (aloud) to multiple lexicons.

Early Parallel Activation of Semantics and Phonology in Picture Naming: Evidence from a Multiple Linear Regression MEG Study.

The time course of brain activation during word production has become an area of increasingly intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. The predominant view has been that semantic and phonological processes are activated sequentially, at about 150 and 200–400 ms after picture onset. Although evidence from prior studies has been interpreted as supporting this view, these studies were arguably not ideally suited to detect early brain activation of semantic and phonological processes. We here used a multiple linear regression approach to magnetoencephalography (MEG) analysis of picture naming in order to investigate early effects of variables specifically related to visual, semantic, and phonological processing. This was combined with distributed minimum-norm source estimation and region-of-interest analysis. Brain activation associated with visual image complexity appeared in occipital cortex at about 100 ms after picture presentation onset. At about 150 ms, semantic variables became physiologically manifest in left frontotemporal regions. In the same latency range, we found an effect of phonological variables in the left middle temporal gyrus. Our results demonstrate that multiple linear regression analysis is sensitive to early effects of multiple psycholinguistic variables in picture naming. Crucially, our results suggest that access to phonological information might begin in parallel with semantic processing around 150 ms after picture onset.

Facilitation and interference in the color-naming task.

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the phonological activation of the name of pictures when participants had to name the color in which these pictures were depicted. In Experiment 1, participants named the color of pictures whose names and color names shared the phonological beginning (phonologically related condition), the color of pictures whose names and color names did not share phonology (phonologically unrelated condition), and the color of abstract forms (neutral condition). A facilitatory effect was obtained, so participants were faster in the related condition than in the unrelated condition. However, naming latencies were similar in the neutral condition and the unrelated condition. In Experiment 2, the unrelated condition was replaced by a phonologically incongruent condition in which the name of the picture was phonologically unrelated to its color name but related to the name of other response color names. The results showed again a facilitatory effect when the related condition was compared with the incongruent condition. Importantly, an interference effect was also observed, so naming latencies were longer in the incongruent condition than in the neutral condition. These results are discussed in terms of language production models.

Cross-language phonological activation: Evidence from masked onset priming and ERPs

The goal of the present research was to provide direct evidence for the cross-language interaction of phonologies at the sub-lexical level by using the masked onset priming paradigm. More specifically, we investigated whether there is a cross-language masked onset priming effect (MOPE) with L2 (English) primes and L1 (Russian) targets and whether it is modulated by the orthographic similarity of primes and targets. Primes and targets had onsets that overlapped either only phonologically, only orthographically, both phonologically and orthographically, or did not have any overlap. Phonological overlap, but not orthographic overlap, between primes and targets led to faster naming latencies. In contrast, the ERP data provided evidence for effects of both phonological and orthographic overlap. Finally, the time-course of phonological and orthographic processing for our bilinguals mirrored the time-course previously reported for monolinguals in the ERP data. These results provide evidence for shared representations at the sub-lexical level for a bilingual’s two languages.

Children with SLI exhibit delays resolving ambiguous reference

Fast mapping weaknesses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) may be explained by differences in disambiguation, mapping an unknown word to an unnamed object. The impact of language ability and linguistic stimulus on disambiguation was investigated. Sixteen children with SLI (8 preschool, 8 school-age) and sixteen typically developing age-matched children selected referents given familiar and unfamiliar object pairs in three ambiguous conditions: phonologically distinct word (PD), phonologically similar word (PS), no word (NW). Preschoolers with SLI did not disambiguate, unlike typically developing age-matched participants, who consistently selected unfamiliar objects given PD. School-age children with SLI disambiguated given PD. Delays in disambiguation for young children with SLI suggest limitations in processes that facilitate word learning for typically developing children. School-age children with SLI consistently selected familiar objects for PS, unlike typically developing children, suggesting differences in phonological activation for word learning.

Teaching Phonological Accuracy and Communicative Fluency at Thai Secondary Schools

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the opinions of secondary level Thai teachers who teach English. Their perspectives were collected and compared concerning phonological accuracy practice, communicative fluency activities, authentic teaching techniques and determining appropriate ways to solve the problems of phonological teaching and communicative English language teaching in Thailand. The subjects of the study were 96 teachers from 8 secondary schools in Bangkok, Thailand. The research instrument included a questionnaire with thirty items measured on a five point rating scale plus four open-ended questions seeking descriptive data. The data were statistically compiled according to arithmetic mean and percentage. The results showed that the teachers have very highly positive attitudes towards teaching phonological accuracy and highly positive attitudes towards communicative fluency activities. However, teachers’ attitudes do not relate to the pedagogy conducted in their classrooms as highly as expected. It was also found that the teachers considered themselves to have sufficient knowledge of the theoretical content on phonological accuracy and communicative fluency activity, but most of them also wanted to improve their teaching in these aspects. Many problems revealed by the data are discussed to establish appropriate solutions.

The (null) impact of pseudohomophones in lexical decision: No phonological activation in semantic dementia?

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Limited role of phonology in reading Chinese two-character compounds: Evidence from an ERP study

This study investigates the role of phonology in reading logographic Chinese. Specifically, whether phonological information is obligatorily activated in reading Chinese two-character compounds was examined using the masked-priming paradigm with event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Twenty-two native Cantonese Chinese speakers participated in a lexical decision experiment. The targets were visually presented Chinese two-character strings and the participants were asked to judge whether the target in each trial was a legitimate compound word in Chinese. Each target was preceded by a briefly presented word prime. The prime and target shared an identical constituent character in the Character-related condition, a syllable in the Syllable-related condition, were semantically related in the Semantic-related condition, and were unrelated (both phonologically and semantically) in the control condition. The prime–target relationship was manipulated to probe the effects of word-form (i.e., character- or syllable-relatedness) and word-semantic relatedness on phonological (as indexed by an N250 ERP component) and semantic (as indexed by an N400 ERP component) processing. Significant and comparable facilitation effects in reaction time, relative to the control, were observed in the Character-related and the Semantic-related conditions. Furthermore, a significant reduction in ERP amplitudes (N250), relative to the control, was obtained in the Character-related condition in the time window of 150–250ms post target. In addition, attenuation in ERP amplitudes was found in the Semantic-related condition in the window of 250–500ms (N400). However, no significant results (neither behavioral nor ERP) were found in the Syllable-related condition. These results suggest that phonological activation is not mandatory and the role of phonology is minimal at best in reading Chinese two-character compounds.

Trial by trial: selecting first or second language phonology of a visually masked word

People often process non-native linguistic information. Here, we investigated whether first (L1) and second language (L2) phonologies are automatically activated. Response latencies and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, while Russian–English bilinguals read aloud L1 target words (e.g. PEЙC /reis/ ‘flight’) primed with onset-matching L1 (e.g. PAHA /rana/ ‘wound’) or L2 words (e.g. PACK) and corresponding onset-mismatching primes (e.g. L1: КAPA /kara/ ‘punishment’; L2: HOPE). Responses were faster to targets preceded by L1 onset-matched than by onset-mismatched primes. No priming from L2 primes was found due to conflicting phonologies (e.g. <P> is /r/ or /p/). These results were supported by the ERPs suggesting that both, L1 and L2 phonologies are simultaneously activated, after which the phonology belonging to the language of the prime is selected. The results provide support for non-selective models of bilingual reading, which assume automatic activation of the non-target language phonology even when it is not required by the task.

Effects of phonological and semantic deficits on facilitative and inhibitory consequences of item repetition in spoken word comprehension

Repeating a word can have both facilitative and inhibitory effects on subsequent processing. The present study investigated these dynamics by examining the facilitative and inhibitory consequences of different kinds of item repetition in two individuals with aphasia and a group of neurologically intact control participants. The two individuals with aphasia were matched on overall aphasia severity, but had deficits at different levels of processing: one with a phonological deficit and spared semantic processing, the other with a semantic deficit and spared phonological processing. Participants completed a spoken word-to-picture matching task in which they had to pick which of four object images matched the spoken word. The trials were grouped into pairs such that exactly two objects from the first trial in a pair were present on screen during the second trial in the pair. When the second trial's target was the same as the first trial's target, compared to control participants, both participants with aphasia exhibited equally larger repetition priming effects. When the second trial's target was one of the new items, the participant with a phonological deficit exhibited a significantly more negative effect (i.e., second trial response slower than first trial response) than the control participants and the participant with a semantic deficit. Simulations of a computational model confirmed that this pattern of results could arise from (1) normal residual activation being functionally more significant when overall lexical processing is slower and (2) residual phonological activation of the previous trial's target having a particularly strong inhibitory effect specifically when phonological processing is impaired because the task was phonologically-driven (the spoken input specified the target). These results provide new insights into perseveration errors and lexical access deficits in aphasia.

Partial word knowledge in the absence of recall

Attributes of words can be known even when the words are not currently retrievable. Although repeatedly demonstrated for semantic and contextual dimensions, the evidence is ambiguous for structural characteristics. The present research demonstrates significant above-chance first-letter knowledge across four ordinal levels of retrieval confidence for nonretrieved words--tip of the tongue (TOT), high familiar, low familiar, unfamiliar. Contrary to prior research, there was minimal evidence for syllable number knowledge, even at highest confidence levels. Initial letter recognition in the absence of retrieval resembles the recognition without identification in episodic memory (Cleary, Current Directions in Psychological Science 17: 353-357, 2008), and such implicit familiarity may contribute more generally to confidence assessments of word knowledge in both semantic and episodic memory domains. Furthermore, this outcome suggests that word feature priming in the form of partial phonological activation may occur to some extent for all words during a retrieval attempt, and even for ones that are judged to be unknown.

The Activation of Orthography and Phonology During Chinese Sentence Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

The Activation of Orthography and Phonology During Chinese Sentence Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements

Developing Language Students' Phonological Awareness Through Poetry

Phonological awareness may be defined as an individual’s awareness of the phonological or sound structure of spoken words. Usually the term is related to the sphere of preschool and elementary classroom training, as it is one of the most important predictors of reading in normally developing children. However, when it comes to adult teaching, for example non-native English philology students, an in-depth study of phonetics is a necessity. The nature of the subject requires building cumulative knowledge, ear-training and taking a good grasp in phonology of both native and target languages, i.e. developing their phonological awareness. When combined with poetry of the studied language, it may become an interesting and motivating activity, leading to a better understanding of the language, phonetic proficiency as well as expansion of the general knowledge of English literature. The main objectives of this article are 1) to discuss the general terminology and content of phonological awareness 2) to share experience on how poetry may be applied as a successful teaching tool for developing students’ phonological awareness. Therefore, the concepts of rhyme, rhythm, consonance, assonance, alliteration, etc. are discussed and examples of possible phonological activities used for analyzing poetry are given.

FMRI evidence for the interaction between orthography and phonology in reading Chinese compound words

Compound words make up a major part of modern Chinese vocabulary. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that access to lexical semantics of compound words is driven by the interaction between orthographic and phonological information. However, little is known about the neural underpinnings of compound word processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we asked participants to perform lexical decisions to pseudohomophones, which were constructed by replacing one or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographically dissimilar homophonic characters. Mixed pseudohomophones, which shared the first constituent with the base words, were more difficult to reject than non-pseudohomophone non-words. This effect was accompanied by the increased activation of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and left angular gyrus. The pure pseudohomophones, which shared no constituent with their base words, were rejected as quickly as non-word controls and did not elicit any significant neural activation. The effective connectivity of a phonological pathway from left IPL to left IFG was enhanced for the mixed pseudohomophones but not for pure pseudohomophones. These findings demonstrated that phonological activation alone, as in the case of the pure pseudohomophones, is not sufficient to drive access to lexical representations of compound words, and that orthographic information interacts with phonology, playing a gating role in the recognition of Chinese compound words.

Cross-script phonological priming for Japanese-English bilinguals: Evidence for integrated phonological representations

Previous masked phonological priming studies with bilinguals whose languages are written in the same script (e.g., Dutch-French bilinguals) strongly suggest that phonological representations for the two languages are integrated, based on the fact that phonological activation created by reading a word in one language facilitates word identification in the other language. The present research examined whether the same is true for different-script bilinguals (Japanese-English bilinguals). In this study, participants made lexical decisions to English targets (e.g., GUIDE) that were primed by three types of masked Japanese primes: cognate translation equivalents (e.g., , /gaido/, guide), phonologically similar but conceptually unrelated words (e.g., , /saido/, side), and phonologically and conceptually unrelated words (e.g., , /koRru/, call). There were significant priming effects for cognate translation primes (94 ms) and phonologically similar primes (30 ms). Whereas the cognate translation priming effect was modulated by target frequency and L2 proficiency, the phonological priming effect was not. Our results suggest that phonological representations for different languages are integrated even if the languages in question use different scripts. The role of phonological activation in bilingual word recognition is discussed.

Translation recognition in highly proficient Hindi–English bilinguals: The influence of different scripts but connectable phonologies

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi–English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a nontranslation distractor word and thus required a no response. The properties of the no trials were manipulated to examine participants' sensitivity to orthographic and phonological relations. The first manipulation investigated whether different-script bilinguals utilise the L1 translation equivalent link in a similar fashion as same-script bilinguals and tested the generalisability of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) to the case of different-script bilinguals. The second manipulation tested the predictions of the Bilingual Interactive Activation plus model (BIA +) regarding phonological nonselectivity in the bilingual lexicon. Results suggest that these highly proficient different-script bilinguals utilise translation equivalent lexical links in a distinct manner from same-script bilinguals, but do display nonselective phonological activation in the form of facilitation across languages that do not share script.

The role of orthography and phonology in English: An ERP study on first and second language reading aloud

This study investigated the role of orthographic and phonological information in reading aloud. Dutch-English bilinguals (L2) and native English (L1) participants read aloud English words. The contribution of orthographic and phonological activation was distinguished with prime manipulation. Phonological overlap, but not orthographic overlap, facilitated the response latencies for both English L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event-related brain potentials also revealed orthographic priming for both groups. Altogether, the present results demonstrate that late L2 speakers exhibit a Masked Onset Priming Effect similar to that of native speakers. In addition, the ERP results revealed that orthographic information is activated earlier during reading, but is not detectable anymore at the behavioral response level when the task is reading aloud.

Tip-of-the-tongue in aging: influence of vocabulary, working memory and processing speed.

It is well known that tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) states, which are due to failure in the phonological activation of words, especially proper names, are more common in older than in younger adults. Nevertheless, the relationship between increased numbers of ToTs and cognitive aging remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to clarify this relationship by examining ToT production and the performance of cognitive tasks such as working memory and processing speed tests. In order to study the relationships between these constructs, the performance of 133 participants in different language, working memory and processing speed tasks was analysed by use of LISREL software. The best fit model included direct and indirect effects of age, mediated by cognitive variables, on lexical production variables. The model incorporated the indirect effects of age on vocabulary through working memory and also the indirect effect of age on ToT through processing speed. The results indicate negative modulation of slowed processing in the age-related increase of ToT and positive modulation of working memory in vocabulary, as well as an absence of any relation between vocabulary and ToT. Assuming that ToT events involve controlled processes, the relationship between slowed processing and ToT in aging could be interpreted as reflecting controlled compensatory mechanisms.