The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production

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.

Database of word-level statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN)

In this article we present the Database of Word-Level Statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN). The database addresses the lack of agreement in phonological syllable segmentation specific to Mandarin by offering phonological features for each lexical item according to 16 schematic representations of the syllable (8 with tone and 8 without tone). Those lexical statistics that differ per phonological word and nonword due to changes in syllable segmentation are of the variant category and include subtitle lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density measures, homophone density, and network science measures. The invariant characteristics consist of each items' lexical tone, phonological transcription, and syllable structure among others. The goal of DoWLS-MAN is to provide researchers both the ability to choose stimuli that are derived from a segmentation schema that supports an existing model of Mandarin speech processing, and the ability to choose stimuli that allow for the testing of hypotheses on phonological segmentation according to multiple schemas. In an exploratory analysis we illustrate how multiple schematic representations of the phonological mental lexicon can aid in hypothesis generation, specifically in terms of phonological processing when reading Chinese orthography. Users of the database can search among over 92,000 words, over 1600 out-of-vocabulary Chinese characters, and 4300 phonological nonwords according to either Chinese orthography, pinyin, or ASCII phonetic script. Users can also generate a list of phonological words and nonwords according to user-defined ranges and categories of lexical characteristics. DoWLS-MAN is available to the public for search or download at https://dowls.site .

Remediation of a phonological representation deficit in Chinese children with dyslexia: A comparison between metalinguistic training and working memory training

A form-preparation task in the language production field was adopted to examine output phonological representations in Chinese dyslexia and their susceptibility to training. Forty-one Chinese children with dyslexia (7-11 years old) and 36 chronological age controls completed this task. The controls demonstrated a marginally significant syllable facilitation effect (d = -0.13), indicating their use of syllable-sized phonological representations during speech production, while the group with dyslexia showed a significantly different pattern (d = 0.04), opposite to the direction of a facilitation effect. The children with dyslexia were then randomly assigned to either metalinguistic training (N = 22) or working memory training (N = 19). Only the metalinguistic training subgroup demonstrated a significant syllable facilitation effect afterward (metalinguistic: d = -0.13; working memory: d = -0.01). The results suggest the presence of a phonological representation deficit at the syllable level in Chinese dyslexia and its possible remediation by metalinguistic training. Such a phonological deficit in readers of a logographic script strongly supports the impaired phonological representation view of developmental dyslexia. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/zT2Be0xMkh0.

Orthographic properties of distractors do influence phonological Stroop effects: Evidence from Japanese Romaji distractors

In attempting to understand mental processes, it is important to use a task that appropriately reflects the underlying processes being investigated. Recently, Verdonschot and Kinoshita (Memory & Cognition, 46, 410-425, 2018) proposed that a variant of the Stroop task-the "phonological Stroop task"-might be a suitable tool for investigating speech production. The major advantage of this task is that the task is apparently not affected by the orthographic properties of the stimuli, unlike other, commonly used, tasks (e.g., associative-cuing and word-reading tasks). The viability of this proposal was examined in the present experiments by manipulating the script types of Japanese distractors. For Romaji distractors (e.g., "kushi"), color-naming responses were faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the color name and the distractor than when the initial phonemes were different, thereby showing a phoneme-based phonological Stroop effect (Experiment 1). In contrast, no such effect was observed when the same distractors were presented in Katakana (e.g., "くし"), replicating Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original results (Experiment 2). A phoneme-based effect was again found when the Katakana distractors used in Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original study were transcribed and presented in Romaji (Experiment 3). Because the observation of a phonemic effect directly depended on the orthographic properties of the distractor stimuli, we conclude that the phonological Stroop task is also susceptible to orthographic influences.

Phonological network fluency identifies phonological restructuring through mental search

We investigated network principles underlying mental search through a novel phonological verbal fluency task. Post exclusion, 95 native-language Mandarin speakers produced as many items that differed by a single lexical tone as possible within one minute. Their verbal productions were assessed according to several novel graded fluency measures, and network science measures that accounted for the structure, cohesion and interconnectedness of lexical items. A multivariate regression analysis of our participants' language backgrounds included their mono- or multi-lingual status, English proficiency, and fluency in other Chinese languages/dialects. Higher English proficiency predicted lower error rates and greater interconnectedness, while higher fluency in other Chinese languages/dialects revealed lower successive similarity and lower network coherence. This inverse relationship between English and other Chinese languages/dialects provides evidence of the restructuring of the phonological mental lexicon.