Using Korean to investigate phonological priming effects without the influence of orthography

Phonological Preparation in Korean: Phoneme, or Syllable or Another Unit?

With three experiments, the present study investigated the primary phonological preparation (PP) unit in spoken word production in Korean. Adopting the form preparation paradigm, 23 native Korean speakers named pictures in homogenous or heterogenous lists. In homogenous lists, the names of the pictures shared the same initial phoneme (Experiment 1), initial consonant + vowel (i.e., CV) body (Experiment 2), or initial consonant + vowel + consonant (CVC) syllable (Experiment 3); and in heterogenous lists, the names did not share any phonological components systematically. Compared to naming pictures in heterogenous lists, participants' naming speed was significantly faster when the initial body or the initial syllable of target names was shared. However, this form preparation effect was not shown in Experiment 1, when only the initial phoneme was shared. These results suggested that the body serves as the primary PP unit in Korean, that is, native Korean speakers tend to plan spoken words in a body-coda fashion, probably due to a joint contribution from the strong prevalence of the CV structure and early literacy instructional approach.

The proximate unit in Korean speech production: Phoneme or syllable?

We investigated the "proximate unit" in Korean, that is, the initial phonological unit selected in speech production by Korean speakers. Previous studies have shown mixed evidence indicating either a phoneme-sized or a syllable-sized unit. We conducted two experiments in which participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed non-words. In English, for this task, when the picture (e.g., dog) and distractor phonology (e.g., dark) initially overlap, typically the picture target is named faster. We used a range of conditions (in Korean) varying from onset overlap to syllabic overlap, and the results indicated an important role for the syllable, but not the phoneme. We suggest that the basic unit used in phonological encoding in Korean is different from Germanic languages such as English and Dutch and also from Japanese and possibly also Chinese. Models dealing with the architecture of language production can use these results when providing a framework suitable for all languages in the world, including Korean.

EPS mid-career prize lecture 2017: Writing systems, reading, and language

Skilled reading reflects an accumulation of experience with written language. Written language is typically viewed as an expression of spoken language, and this perspective has motivated approaches to understanding reading and reading acquisition. However, in this article, I develop the proposal that written language has diverged from spoken language in important ways that maximise the transmission of meaningful information, and that this divergence has been central to the development of rapid, skilled reading. I use English as an example to show that weaknesses in the relationship between spelling and sound can give rise to strong regularities between spelling and meaning that are critical for the rapid analysis of printed words. I conclude by arguing that the nature of the reading system is a reflection of the writing system and that a deep understanding of reading can be obtained only through a deep understanding of written language.

Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation

Speech production studies have shown that phonological unit initially used to fill the metrical frame during phonological encoding is language specific, that is, a phoneme for English and Dutch, an atonal syllable for Mandarin Chinese, and a mora for Japanese. However, only a few studies chronometrically investigated speech production in Korean, and they obtained mixed results. Korean is particularly interesting as there might be both phonemic and syllabic influences during phonological encoding. The purpose of this study is to further examine the initial phonological preparation unit in Korean, employing a masked priming task (Experiment 1) and a phonological Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that significant onset (and onset-plus, that is, consonant-vowel [CV]) effects were found in both experiments, but there was no compelling evidence for a prominent role for the syllable. When the prime words were presented in three different forms related to the targets, namely, without any change, with re-syllabified codas, and with nasalised codas, there were no significant differences in facilitation among the three forms. Alternatively, it is also possible that participants may not have had sufficient time to process the primes up to the point that re-syllabification or nasalisation could have been carried out. In addition, the results of a Stroop task demonstrated that the onset phoneme effect was not driven by any orthographic influence. These findings suggest that the onset segment and not the syllable is the initial (or proximate) phonological unit used in the segment-to-frame encoding process during speech planning in Korean.

The Time Course for Processing Vowels and Lexical Tones: Reading Aloud Thai Words

Three naming aloud experiments and a lexical decision (LD) experiment used masked priming to index the processing of written Thai vowels and tones. Thai allows for manipulation of the mapping between orthography and phonology not possible in other orthographies, for example, the use of consonants, vowels and tone markers in both horizontal and vertical orthographic positions (HOPs and VOPs). Experiment I showed that changing a vowel between prime and target slowed down target naming but changing a tone mark did not. Experiment I used an across item-design and a different number of HOPs in the way vowels and tones were specified. Experiment 2 used a within-item design and tested vowel and tone changes for both 2-HOP and 3-HOP targets separately. The 3-HOP words showed the same tone and vowel change effect as Experiment 1, whereas 2-HOP items did not. It was speculated that the 2-HOP result was due to the variable position of the vowel affecting priming. Experiment 3 employed a more stringent control over the 2-HOP vowel and tone items and found priming for the tone changes but not for vowel changes. The final experiment retested the items from Experiment 3 with the LD task and found no priming for the tone change items, indicating that the tone effect in Experiment 3 was due to processes involved in naming aloud. In all, the results supported the view that for naming a word, the development of tone information is slower than vowel information.

Translation and Associative Priming With Cross-Lingual Pseudohomophones: Evidence for Nonselective Phonological Activation in Bilinguals

Using a lexical-decision task performed by Dutch-English bilinguals, the author showed that the recognition of visually presented first language (L1; e.g., touw) and second language (L2; e.g., back) targets is facilitated by L2 and L1 masked primes, respectively, which are pseudohomophones (roap and ruch) of the target's translation equivalent (rope and rug). Moreover, recognition of L2 targets (e.g., church) was also facilitated by L1 pseudohomophones (pous) of related words (paus [pope]). Contrastingly, no priming was observed for L1 targets (e.g., been [leg]) and L2 pseudohomophone associative primes (knea). Finally, the author found that an L2 target word (e.g., corner) is facilitated by a more frequent L2 (intralingual) homophone (e.g., hook) of its L1 translation equivalent (hoek). These findings strongly suggest language-independent activation of phonological representations in bilinguals and are compatible with the temporal delay assumption of the bilingual interactive activation plus model (A. Dijkstra & W. Van Heuven, 2002).