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The present study explored the conditions under which phonological similarity effects arise without orthographic confounds by testing languages with true cognates but divergent scripts. We investigated the similarities and differences between within- and cross-script processing patterns by providing data from an understudied language pair, Korean and Cantonese, which have many cognates but bear no orthographic resemblance. In two word-naming and translation tasks, beginning and intermediate Cantonese-speaking learners of Korean (N = 112) were tested for the processing speed of Sino-Korean words. The results of the word-naming experiments showed that phonologically similar words were processed faster than dissimilar ones, regardless of L2 fluency, especially when the logographic L1 characters were used as primes. However, facilitation by shared phonology was not observed in the translation experiments in either direction. L1-to-L2 forward translation was much faster than L2-to-L1 backward translation, indicating conceptual memory being used as a primary processing pathway. The characteristics of cross-script processing patterns were discussed in terms of the structure of bilingual memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments investigated a common but intriguing phenomenon, that is, repeated personal name confusion, a phenomenon at the border between language and memory. The purpose of those experiments was to evaluate the impact of the semantic and phonological similarities on name confusion and to compare repeated naming confusions (i.e., repeatedly confounding two names) with single confusions (i.e., confounding two names only once) in a same experimental paradigm. In all experiments, participants (64 middle-aged participants for each experiment) were asked to memorize the association between 16 names and 16 faces (face-name learning task). In Experiments 1 and 2, the two studied variables were the phonological similarity between the confused names and the semantic similarity between the two bearers of the confused names (using a visually derived semantic code in Experiment 1 and an identity-specific semantic code in Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, the impact of those two semantic similarities between the bearers of the confused names was taken into account, whereas the phonological similarity was not taken into account. First, results showed a main effect of the phonological and semantic similarity on name confusion (more confusions when the names were phonologically related or when the bearers of the names were semantically related). Second, we found that (1) the combination of the phonological and the semantic similarity and (2) the combination of the two semantic similarities led to an increase of name confusions. Third, in the three experiments, we found that the semantic and phonological similarities had a similar impact on repeated and single confusions. Finally, results showed that participants always made more single than repeated confusions, except in the case when the bearers of the confused names shared two semantic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swapping one or more consonant-graphemes in a word into other phonologically similar ones, which based on both place and manner of articulation, interestingly produces some other words without shifting the syllable boundary (or point). For examples, in the Indonesian language, swapping consonant-graphemes in a word "ba.ra" (embers) creates three new words: "ba.la" (disaster), "pa.ra" (reference to a group), and "pa.la" (nutmeg) without changing the syllabification points since both graphemes ⟨ b ⟩ and ⟨ p ⟩ are in the same category of plosive-bilabial while both ⟨ r ⟩ and ⟨ l ⟩ are trill/lateral-dental. An observation on 50k Indonesian words shows that replacing consonant-graphemes in those words impressively increases the number of unigrams by 16.52 times and significantly increases the number of bigrams by 14.12 times. Therefore, in this paper, a procedure of swapping consonant-graphemes based on phonological similarity is proposed to boost the standard bigram-based orthographic syllabification, which commonly has a low performance for a dataset with many out-of-vocabulary (OOV) bigrams. Some examinations on the 50k words using the k-fold cross-validation scheme, with k = 5 , prove that the proposed procedure significantly boosts the standard bigram-syllabification, where it gives a relative reduction of mean syllable error rate (SER) up to 31.39%. It also shows an improvement for the dataset of 15k named-entities by relatively decreasing the average SER by 9.53%. It is better than a flipping onsets-based model for both datasets. Compared to a nearest neighbor-based model, its performance is a little worse, but it provides much lower complexity. Another important finding is that the proposed model can produce a relatively small SER, even for a tiny training-set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the phenomenon of personal name confusion, i.e. calling a familiar person by someone else's name. Two types of name confusion were considered: single confusions (i.e. confusions that appeared only once) and repeated confusions (i.e. confusions that appeared repeatedly). The main purpose of the present study was to compare these two types of personal name confusion and to identify the similarities and differences between them. Participants were asked to fill in two questionnaires (one for each type of confusion) in order to collect information about the properties of the confusions. Results indicated that single and repeated confusions shared some similarities (the similarity of the gender and age of the bearers of the confused names, the phonological similarity between the confused names, the positive or negative valence of the relationship between the participant and the bearers of the names, the frequency of encountering the bearers of the names, and the low level of stress on the part of the participant when the confusions were made). However, some differences were also found between single and repeated confusions (the context of encountering, the length of time that the participant had known the two bearers of the names, the presence of the inverse confusion, the facial resemblance between the two bearers, the kind of relationship shared by the participant and the two bearers, and the state of tiredness on the part of the participant when the confusions were made). In addition, regression analysis indicated that the facial resemblance between the target person and the intruder, the phonological similarity of the names and the difference in age between the two bearer of the names were significant predictors of the frequency of the repeated confusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical priming is known to arise from phonological similarity between prime and target, and this phenomenon is an important component of our understanding of the processes of lexical access and competition. However, the precise nature of the role of phonological similarity in lexical priming is understudied. In the present study, two experiments were conducted in which participants performed auditory lexical decision on CVC targets which were preceded by primes that either matched the target in all phonemes (CVC condition), in the first two phonemes (CV_ condition), the last two phonemes (_VC condition), the initial and last phonemes (C_C condition) or no phonemes (unrelated condition). Relative to the unrelated condition, all conditions except CV_ led to facilitation of response time to target words. The _VC and C_C conditions led to equivalent facilitation magnitude, while the CV_ condition showed neither facilitation nor inhibition. Accounting for these results requires appeal to processes of lexical competition and also to the notion that phonemes do not lend equivalent phonological similarity; that is, vowels and consonants are processed differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpus analyses of learners’ dictionaries of English idioms have revealed that 11% to 35% of English figurative idioms show either alliteration (miss the mark) or assonance (get this show on the road), depending on the type considered. Because English multiword combinations, particularly idiomatic expressions, present a huge challenge even to advanced learners, techniques for helping learners come to grips with this part of the lexicon should be welcomed. A quasi-experiment was conducted to investigate whether interword phonological similarity (specifically, alliteration and assonance) facilitates the delayed recall of the forms of common second language (L2) English figurative idioms which were not known at pretest. Twenty-six advanced-level EFL learners learned significantly more phonologically similar, or ‘sound-repeating’, idioms than phonologically dissimilar control idioms after a treatment designed to raise awareness of phonological similarity and to direct learners’ attention toward occurrences of it. Learners in a comparison group (n = 24), who experienced no awareness raising or attention direction, recalled more non-sound-repeating control idioms than sound-repeating ones. We conclude that the presence of sound-repetition in idioms makes the forms of those idioms relatively easy to recall, but only when learners experience appropriate awareness raising and attention direction. It appears that the techniques of awareness raising and attention direction did not hinder learning of the control idioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large-scale picture-naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish-Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non-dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuropsychological studies of verbal short-term memory have often focused on two signature effects - phonological similarity and word length - the absence of which has been taken to indicate problems in phonological storage and rehearsal respectively. In the present study we present a possible alternative reading of such data, namely that the absence of these effects can follow as a consequence of an individual's poor level of recall. Data from a large normative sample of 251 adult participants were re-analyzed under the assumption that the size of phonological similarity and word length effects are proportional to an individual's overall level of recall. For both manipulations, when proportionalized effects were plotted against memory span, the same function fit the data in both auditory and visual presentation conditions. Furthermore, two additional sets of single-case data were broadly comparable to those that would be expected for an individual's level of verbal short-term memory performance albeit with some variation across tasks. These findings indicate that the absolute magnitude of phonological similarity and word length effects depends on overall levels of recall, and that these effects are necessarily eliminated at low levels of verbal short-term memory performance. This has implications for how one interprets any variation in the size of these effects, and raises serious questions about the causal direction of any relationship between impaired verbal short-term memory and the absence of phonological similarity or word length effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving nonnative phonological contrasts. Even relatively advanced learners, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /ɹ/–/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty with which L2 learners perceive and acquire nonnative contrasts, theories of L2 speech perception and phonology often appeal to notions of ‘similarity’, but how is ‘similarity’ best captured? In this article, we review two prominent approaches to similarity in L2 speech perception and phonology and present the findings from two experiments that investigated the role of phonological features in the perception and lexical representation of two vowel contrasts that exist in English, but not in Spanish. In particular, we explored whether L1 phonological features can be reused to represent nonnative contrasts in the second language (Brown, 1998, 2000), as well as to what extent new phonological structure might be acquired by advanced late-learners. We show that second language acquisition of phonology is not constrained by the phonological features made available by the learner’s native language grammar, nor is the use of particular phonological features in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. These findings suggest that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient, condition to predict the observed learning outcomes. These results are discussed in the context of current theories of nonnative and L2 speech perception and phonological development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation equivalents (TEs) characterize the lexicon of bilinguals from the early stages of acquisition, as reported in studies involving English and other languages in which most cross-language synonyms are dissimilar in phonological form. This research explores the emergence of TEs in Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who are acquiring two languages with many cognate words and thus languages with many cross-language synonyms with identical or similar phonological forms. Expressive vocabulary was obtained in two 18-month-old groups (monolingual and bilingual, N = 24 each) through parental report using a bilingual questionnaire. Four different vocabulary size measures were computed in bilinguals, correcting for different types of phonological overlap in words across their two languages. Bilinguals were found comparable to monolinguals in every measure except for Total Vocabulary Size (Spanish + Catalan words) in which they outscored monolinguals due to the high number of form-identical cross-language elements in their expressive vocabularies. Form-similar and dissimilar TEs accounted for less than 2% of the words produced and were only present in infants with larger vocabularies. Results support the hypothesis that phonological form proximity between words across bilinguals' two languages facilitates early lexical acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonological similarity effect (PSE) should occur when the domain-specific system is involved in maintenance, but should disappear when concurrent articulation hinders its use. Impeding maintenance in the domain-general system by a concurrent attentional demand should impair recall performance without affecting PSE. In three experiments, we manipulated the concurrent articulation and the attentional demand induced by the processing component of complex span tasks in which participants had to maintain lists of either similar or dissimilar words. Confirming our predictions, PSE affected recall performance in complex span tasks. Although both the attentional demand and the articulatory requirement of the concurrent task impaired recall, only the induction of an articulatory suppression during maintenance made the PSE disappear. These results suggest a duality in the systems devoted to verbal maintenance in the short term, constraining models of working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background & Aims The present study examined how phonological and lexical knowledge influences memory in children with specific language impairments (SLI). Previous work showed recall advantages for typical adults and children due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency and a recall disadvantage due to phonological similarity among words. While children with SLI have well-documented memory difficulties, it is not clear whether these language knowledge factors also influence recall in this population. Methods & Procedures Sixteen children with SLI (mean age = 10;2) and chronological age-matched typically developing children (CAM) controls recalled lists of words differing in phonological similarity, word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency. While previous studies used a small set of words appearing in multiple word lists, the current study used a larger set of words, without replacement, so that children could not gain practice with individual test items. Outcomes & Results All main effects were significant. Interactions revealed that children with SLI were affected by similarity, but less so than their peers, comparably affected by word frequency and unaffected by phonotactic pattern frequency. Conclusions & Implications Results due to phonological similarity suggest that children with SLI use less efficient encoding, while results due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency were mixed. Children with SLI used coarse-grained language knowledge (word frequency) comparably with peers, but were less able to use fine-grained knowledge (phonotactic pattern frequency). Paired with phonological similarity results, this suggests that children with SLI have difficulty establishing robust phonological knowledge for use in language tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We created a novel paradigm to investigate phonological processing in sign and asked how age of acquisition (AoA) may affect it. Participants indicated which of two signs was more phonologically similar to a target, and estimated the strength of the resemblance with a mouse click along a continuous scale. We manipulated AoA by testing deaf native and non-native signers, and hearing L2 signers and sign-naïve participants. Consistent with previous research, judgments by the native and L2 signers reflected similarity based on shared phonological features between signs. By contrast, judgments by the non-native signers and sign-naïve participants were influenced by other (potentially visual or somatosensory) properties of signs that native and L2 signers ignored. These results suggest that early exposure to language helps a learner discern which aspects of a linguistic signal are most likely to matter for language learning, even if that language belongs to a different modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When participants are asked to recall lists of items in the reverse order, known as backward recall, several benchmark memory phenomena, such as the word length effect, are abolished (Bireta et al. Memory & Cognition 38:279-291, ). Bireta et al. (Memory & Cognition 38:279-291, ) suggested that in backward recall, reliance on order retention is increased at the expense of item retention, leading to the abolition of item-based phenomena. In a subsequent study, however, Guérard and Saint-Aubin () showed that four lexical factors known to modulate item retention were unaffected by recall direction. In a series of five experiments, we examined the source of the discrepancy between the two studies. We revisited the effects of phonological similarity, word length, articulatory suppression, and irrelevant speech, using open and closed pools of words in backward and forward recall. The results are unequivocal in showing that none of these effects are influenced by recall direction, suggesting that Bireta et al.'s (Memory & Cognition 38:279-291, ) results are the consequence of their particular stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments were conducted to examine the effect of phonological similarity in simple and complex memory span tasks. In Experiment 1, participants performed either a simple or a complex span task, and the memoranda within lists were either phonologically similar or distinct. Phonologically similar lists consisted of words that rhymed.The simple span task was word span. There were two complex span tasks; one was the original reading span task, and the other was a variant of reading span in which all the sentences within a list were contextually related. The classic phonological similarity decrement was observed in word span. In contrast, phonological similarity facilitation was observed in both versions of reading span. This facilitation effect was further investigated in Experiment 2 using two new versions of reading span. In Experiment 2, the sentences in reading span were either short or long, and the memoranda were presented separately from, and were unrelated to, the sentences. Again, words within phonologically similar lists rhymed, and again, facilitation was observed. In Experiment 3, phonological similarity was operationalized in terms of feature overlap, rather than rhyme. The classic phonological similarity decrement was still observed in word span, but facilitation was not observed in complex span. The results suggest that phonological similarity, when operationalized using words that rhyme, serves as a list retrieval cue and that complex span tasks are more dependent on cue-driven memory retrieval mechanisms than are simple span tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because both articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing aid in the maintenance of verbal information in the short term, the present study evaluated the adaptive use of these mechanisms, using a complex span paradigm. In Experiment 1, the phonological similarity of memory list words and the attentional demand of concurrent processing were manipulated. As was predicted, a phonological similarity effect (PSE) appeared only when the concurrent task was attention demanding, thus impairing the use of refreshing and encouraging rehearsal. To verify that PSE indicates the use of rehearsal, participants were instructed to use one of the two mechanisms in Experiments 2 and 3. In accordance wih Experiment 1, the PSE was observed only under rehearsal. Thus, adults could adaptively choose between the two mechanisms. When remembering phonologically confusable materials, they prefer refreshing in order to reduce the impact of phonological characteristics. When available attention is reduced, they favor a less attention-demanding mechanism, rehearsal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing body of research supports the existence of separable short- and long-term memory systems, relying on phonological and semantic codes, respectively. The aim of the current study was to measure the contribution of long-term knowledge to short-term memory performance by looking for evidence of phonologically and semantically coded storage within a short-term recognition task, among developmental samples. Each experimental trial presented 4-item lists. In Experiment 1 typically developing children aged 5 to 6 years old showed evidence of phonologically coded storage across all 4 serial positions, but evidence of semantically coded storage at Serial Positions 1 and 2. In a further experiment, a group of individuals with Down syndrome was investigated as a test case that might be expected to use semantic coding to support short-term storage, but these participants showed no evidence of semantically coded storage and evidenced phonologically coded storage only at Serial Position 4, suggesting that individuals with Down syndrome have a verbal short-term memory capacity of 1 item. Our results suggest that previous evidence of semantic effects on “short-term memory performance” does not reflect semantic coding in short-term memory itself, and provide an experimental method for researchers wishing to take a relatively pure measure of verbal short-term memory capacity, in cases where rehearsal is unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of binding information from different modalities and sources into an object is ubiquitous in cognition and has been a problem for research and modelling efforts in psychology. This process has been considered by most researchers as necessarily always beneficial to memory. In the present study we provide evidence that binding can be detrimental through the propagation of vulnerabilities to interference. Phonologically similar and dissimilar letters were presented sequentially at different locations on a computer monitor. Participants had to recall either the letters in their order of presentation or the spatial locations at which the letters had appeared. Whether binding was encouraged or not—providing prior knowledge of which dimension to remember—phonological similarity had a detrimental effect on recall of locations. Such a finding poses a challenge to the view that binding is the panacea in enhancing memory capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]