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This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that prosodic learning is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French–Korean) than if they are phonologically different (English–French/Korean) (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis; Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). This study provides another test of this hypothesis. Korean listeners and French-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of Korean in Korea completed an eye-tracking experiment investigating the effects of phrase tones in Korean. All groups patterned similarly with the phrase-final tone, but, unlike Korean and French listeners, English listeners showed early benefits from the phrase-initial tone (signaling word-initial boundaries in English). Importantly, French listeners patterned like Korean listeners with both tones. The Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis is refined to suggest that prosodic learning difficulties may not be persistent for immersed L2 learners.

Previous studies found that English figurative idioms alliterate at above chance levels. To permit estimation of amounts of surplus alliteration Gries (2011) calculated baseline levels using an analytic method. This article reports a follow-on investigation covering types of multiword unit (MWU) and types of interword, intraMWU phonological similarity (PhS) considered neither by Gries nor by an even earlier study. In contrast to Gries (2011), baseline levels of PhS were estimated using a stochastic method. In samples of figurative idioms upward departures from baseline levels – expressed as standardized effect sizes – ranged from small to medium for assonance, up to large for alliteration, and even larger for rhyme and alliteration-with-assonance. For samples of (relatively) non-idiomatic MWUs upward departures from baselines were generally small or, in the case of academic collocations, downward. The practicality of the stochastic method is discussed, as are a possible role of interword PhS in the conventionalization of word strings and possible roles of interword, intra-idiom PhS in oral communication. Overall, the findings are problematic for a non-usage-based theory but compatible with a cognitive linguistic theory in which motivation can operate entirely within the phonological pole of a MWU.

배경 및 목적: 본 연구에서는 표준화 검사인 ‘한국판 맥아더-베이츠 의사소통발달 평가(K M-B CDI)’를 사용하여 18-36개월 유아가 지닌 어휘를 통해 단어의 음운유사도 양상을 확인하고, 전반적인 표현어휘력을 가장 잘 설명해 줄 수 있는 음운유사도 유형은 무엇인지 살펴보고자 하였다. 방법: 연구 1에서는 약 8개월간의 시간 차를 두고 음운유사도 양상을...

Humor is essential to establish more natural and enjoyable human–computer interactions, and researchers have been working on developing a way to automatically generate humor. This study aims to explore a better way to automatically generate Japanese common humor “soramimi”, and understand how the humor occurs. Soramimi is a type of parody song in which the original lyrics are replaced by different words that have similar pronunciations. Although a previous study proposed an algorithm to replace input text with homophonic soramimi text, the mechanism of soramimi humor is still unclear. Based on the incongruity-resolution model, we hypothesized that phonological similarity between the parody and the original lyrics enhances humor in soramimi. A subjective experiment was conducted in which the phonological similarity and humor of fifteen soramimi parody lyrics were evaluated. The results indicated that the phonological similarity of soramimi was positively correlated with its humorousness. Exploring other factors that affect humorousness and the development of an automatic generation system for soramimi lyrics based on the identified factors are topics for our future research.

We investigated how phonologically similar words are encoded and retrieved from memory during sentence processing across younger and older adults. Critical sentences included two phonologically similar or dissimilar noun phrases (henceforth NPs) followed by a pronoun. We examined brain activity time-locked to the onsets of the second NP, and the pronoun to investigate the encoding and retrieval of the NPs, respectively. Encoding the second NP resulted in smaller N400 amplitudes when the preceding NP was phonologically similar, for both younger and older adults, suggesting age-invariant encoding facilitation with increasing phonological similarity. However, when processing the pronoun, younger adults exhibited greater negativity following phonologically similar NPs, suggesting retrieval difficulty, whereas older adults showed greater negativity for pronouns following dissimilar NPs, suggesting an apparent retrieval facilitation. A post-hoc behavioral experiment suggested that older adults perform shallow processing during retrieval. The results suggest age-related decline in retrieval, but not encoding, of phonological information.

L’épreuve de répétition de non-mots LITMUS-NWR-FR (Ferré & Santos, 2015) a été élaborée afin d’évaluer essentiellement le domaine phonologique chez l’enfant monolingue ou bilingue. L’objet de notre étude est de s’assurer que LITMUS-NWR-FR remplit cet objectif en s’intéressant à la contribution respective des variables suivantes dans les performances à ce test : la mémoire à court terme verbale (MCTv) et la similarité phonologique, la flexibilité cognitive, le niveau socio-économique (NSE) et le bilinguisme. 193 enfants tout-venant âgés de 3;10 à 5;0 ans ont été évalués à l’aide d’épreuves cognitivo-langagières et de questionnaires parentaux. Les résultats ne révèlent aucun effet du bilinguisme sur les performances à LITMUS-NWR-FR, et le NSE ne présente pas de lien substantiel avec ces performances. La MCTv explique une part non négligeable de la variance des scores à LITMUS-NWR-FR (35%). Toutefois, la part expliquée par l’ensemble des variables étudiées demeure modérée. Ce résultat conforte notre hypothèse selon laquelle ce test mesure principalement la phonologie.

The aim of this study is to examine the results of theexperiment when phonologically and acoustically similar and non-similar wordlists of four conditions are presented in three different retention intervals.The relevant literature about short tremmemory is summarized within the models of Alan Baddeley’s Working Memory Model,James Nairne’s Feature Model and Dylan M. Jones, Robert W. Hughes, William J. Macken’s Perceptual Model. The effects of phonological similarity, acousticsimilarity, modality and retention interval are examined through these models.In the present experiment; phonologically and acoustically similar andnon-similar lists of five words are presented in four conditions among threedifferent intervals with the participation of 80 students from UludagUniversity. After examinig the data it was found that phonological similarityhad a main effect as the similar lists were recalled less correctly; serialposition had a main effect in terms of recency and primacy; and retentioninterval had a main effect as the longer the interval gets, the recallperformance drops. Phonological similarity proved to be effective as opposed tothe findings ine the literature found before. Acoustic similarity had no maineffect like theorized as the models that focus the importance on the perceptualfeatures. The results are discussed through the relevant literature and thesummarized models and suggestions are made regarding the studies that can becarried out from now on., Bu çalışmanın amacı;işitsel olarak sunulan kelime listelerinin fonolojik ve akustik benzer olan veolmayan koşullarda, hatırlamada üç farklı gecikme türü ile sunulduğunda ortayaçıkan sonuçların incelenmesidir. Kısa süreli bellek ile ilgili literatür AlanBaddeley’nin Çalışma Belleği Modeli, James Nairne’in Özellik Modeli ve Dylan M.Jones, Robert W. Hughes ve William J. Macken’ın Algısal Modeli çerçevesindeözetlenmiştir. Kısa süreli bellek çalışmalarında karşımıza çıkan fonolojikbenzerlik etkisi, akustik benzerlik etkisi, modalite etkisi ve hatırlamada gecikme;bu modeller doğrultusunda ele alınmıştır. Bu çalışmada Uludağ Üniversitesi’ndeeğitim görmekte olan 80 öğrencinin katılımıyla, fonolojik ve akustik olarakbenzer olan ve olmayan listeler içindeki beş kelime dört farklı koşulda ve üçfarklı gecikme süresi ile test edilmiştir. Sonuçlar incelendiğinde; fonolojikbenzerlik etkisinin bu çalışmada da geçerli olduğu, benzer olan kelimelerindaha düşük oranda doğru hatırlandığı; kelime sırasının temel etkisinin geçerliolduğu ve listenin başındaki ve sonundaki kelimelerin daha yüksek oranda doğruhatırlandığı ve gecikme süresinin hatırlama performansı üzerinde anlamlı biretki göstererek gecikme süresinin artmasıyla hatırlama performansının düştüğügözlemlenmiştir.Fonolojik benzerlik literatürde daha önce kanıtlananınaksine gecikme süresinin artması ile bilinenin aksi yönde etki etmemiştir.Algısal özellikleri ön plana çıkaran modellerin varsaydığı şekilde akustikbenzerlik etkisinin hatırlama performansı üzerindeetkisi olmadığı görülmüştür. Sonuçlar ilgili literatür ve özetlenmeye çalışılanmodeller doğrultusunda tartışılmış, bundan sonra yapılabilecek çalışmalar içinöneriler sunulmuştur.

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.

This study examines the effects of within-sequence repetitions for visually presented consonants under conditions of quiet and concurrent articulation (CA). In an immediate serial recall (ISR) procedure, participants wrote down the six consonants in the order of original presentation. CA reduced serial recall and abolished the phonological similarity effect. However, the effects of within-trial repetitions were broadly similar under quiet and CA. Specifically, adjacent repetitions facilitated recall of the repeated item, whereas spaced repetitions (separated by three intervening items) impaired recall accuracy for the repeated item (i.e., the Ranschburg effect). These data are the first to demonstrate the Ranschburg effect for visual-verbal stimuli under CA.

The purpose of this paper is to find triggering factors of labial/velar alternation in Korean. Labial/ velar shift in Korean was found in the 15th century, and traces of labial/velar shift still remain in some dialects. Interestingly, it is often found in the speech of infants and adults even in standard Korean. This study focuses on finding phonetic and phonological cues of labial/velar alternation in Modern Korean, especially Seoul and Gyeonggi dialects by measuring F2 transitions and vowel distances after and before two phonemes /p/ and /k/ and through performance of two perceptual tasks. In the results, F2 transitions in back vowels are found to be similar regardless of syllable positions, but vowel distances were not relevant. As for the discrimination index d-prime, it decreased when back vowels preceded /p/ and /k/ in one-syllable words. It can be inferred that a phonetic and phonological similarity is asymmetrical from the results.

Spoken word recognition is affected by phonemic and semantic details of speech at pre-lexical and lexical levels. The current study examined how blind people used semantic and phonological cues for spoken word recognition. Thirty blind and twenty-nine age-matched sighted people participated in this study. We manipulated the semantic similarity and phonological similarity between the primes and targets in three experimental conditions: semantic-related with different phonology (S + P-), semantic-unrelated with different phonology (S-P-), and semantic-unrelated with the same phonology (S-P + ). Results showed that blind participants had higher accuracies than sighted individuals in both the S-P- and S-P + conditions. As both groups exhibited larger N400 amplitude in the S-P- versus S + P- conditions, the semantic-unrelated N400 effect was stronger in blind than in sighted participants, suggesting a more sensitive processing of semantic information in blind people. Moreover, sighted participants showed stronger N400 effect in the S-P + than in the S-P- conditions, but blind participants did not, indicating an interference of phonological similarity in spoken word recognition for sighted listeners only. In summary, blind people are more sensitive to semantic cues and less susceptible to phonological similarity interference during spoken word recognition than sighted people.

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.

Phonological similarity effects are biases to judge words as phonologically similar (i.e., rhyming), even if they are not. First found in rime awareness tasks in preliterates, these biases have recently also been found in proficient adult readers. In this study, we evaluated underlying phonological processing in rime judgment longitudinally, across literacy development. To this end, we created a new rime judgment task (rime; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /z∙aɪ̯∙l/) with two distractor conditions that varied in size of phonological overlap (body; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /t∙aɪ̯ ç/; nucleus; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /r∙aɪ̯∙s/). The task was administered to a group of 61 German-speaking children at four time points across school entry and to 21 adults. Accuracy and latency responses were recorded. Results indicated that children and adults showed phonological similarity effects but the effect decreased gradually over time. However, preliterate children were more sensitive to large compared to small phonological overlap, while the same effect was significantly smaller in literate children and adults. Results suggest that preliterate children are more sensitive to larger grain sizes and become more sensitive to fine-grained units across literacy development. The findings are in line with the assumptions of the psycholinguistic grain size theory.

This study examined the development of phonological recoding in short-term memory (STM) span tasks among two clinical groups with contrasting STM and language profiles: those with Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS). Phonological recoding was assessed by comparing: (1) performance on phonologically similar and dissimilar items (phonological similarity effects, PSE); and (2) items with short and long names (word length effects, WLE). Participant groups included children and adolescents with DS (n = 29), WS (n = 25) and typical development (n = 51), all with average mental ages around 6 years. The group with WS, contrary to predictions based on their relatively strong verbal STM and language abilities, showed no evidence for phonological recoding. Those in the group with DS, with weaker verbal STM and language abilities, showed positive evidence for phonological recoding (PSE), but to a lesser degree than the typical group (who showed PSE and WLE). These findings provide new information about the memory systems of these groups of children and adolescents, and suggest that STM processes involving phonological recoding do not fit with the usual expectations of the abilities of children and adolescents with WS and DS. (c) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [FAS 2010-0739]

The present study investigated the role of phonological representations during silent reading of L2 sentences by Korean learners of English in comparison with the effect of pragmatic plausibility thereof. Eighteen Korean college students of English participated in two self-paced reading experiments. In Experiment 1, the participants read sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses for which pragmatic plausibility was manipulated (e.g. The thief/policeman that the policeman/thief arrested was known ...). The result showed that increased processing difficulty for implausible propositions occurred at and after the relative clause verb (e.g. arrested). In Experiment 2, the same participants read sentences of similar structure, in which the phonological similarity between the main and relative clause subjects was manipulated (e.g. The runner/baker that the banker always feared bought ...). The result showed that increased processing difficulty due to phonological overlap occurred at the relative clause subject (e.g., banker). The results are discussed in terms of L2 learners` use of phonological representations in silent L2 reading.

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remains unanswered. In the present study, we reanalyze phonetic data from a previous study, examining the contrasting predictions of different definitions of phonological similarity. Our results suggest that similarity at the level of position-specific phonological segments best predicts the influence of neighbor activation on phonetic properties of initial consonants.

This work presents a perceptual study on how acoustic details and knowledge of the lexicon influence discrimination decisions. English-speaking listeners were less likely to identify phonologically matching items as the same when they differed in vowel duration, but differences in mean F0 did not have an effect. Although both are components of English contrasts, the results only provide evidence for attention to vowel duration as a potentially contrastive cue. Lexical ambiguity was a predictor of response time. Pairs with matching duration were identified more quickly than pairs with distinct duration, but only among lexically ambiguous items, indicating that lexical ambiguity mediates attention to acoustic detail. Lexical ambiguity also interacted with neighborhood density: Among lexically unambiguous words, the proportion of 'same' responses decreased with neighborhood density, but there was no effect among lexically ambiguous words. This interaction suggests that evaluating phonological similarity depends more on lexical information when the items are lexically unambiguous.

In developmental research on memory, the model of working memory of Baddeley and Hitch (1974, Baddeley, 1986) is the theory most often referred to. This theory has played an important role in studies on human learning in general. However, it is not clear how the verbal and visual short term memory systems develop. In order to investigate this development, we argue that some important issues should be taken into account; a longitudinal research design and individual differences between children. The current study is a follow-up study in which we investigated the transitions that a subsample of 30 children made between verbal and visual processing during the course of one year. Our results showed that the children showed large variation in STM processes and did not move from one type of processing to another in a consistent manner. This implies that the development of the verbal and visual STM systems may be less predictable than expected based on the literature, stressing the importance to be cautious when individual differences between children are not taken into account.

Behavioural and neuroimaging studies provide evidence of automatic activation of phonology (e.g., covert speech) during the recognition of lexical stimuli. Implicit processing of phonological information was investigated in a kinematic study of semantic categorisation of pictures (session A) or words (session B). Participants clicked one of two items (target and distractor) based on their semantic congruency (artefact or natural) with a cued-word. Phonological similarity between cued-word and distractor was varied. The presence of the phonological distractor produced trajectories with greater curvature towards the competing semantic category than did the presence of a distractor not phonologically related. This suggests that the semantic categorisation of pictorial and lexical stimuli is influenced by the automatic activation of phonological information. Trajectories' curvature reveals competition between partially activated phonological and semantic representations suggesting that phonological codes involved in linguistic processing influence the dynamic competition underlying the semantic categorisation of lexical and pictorial.

Phonological similarity (i.e., neighborhood density) has been operationalized in the literature as a single phonemic difference between words. However, few studies have assessed the validity of such a measure. In the present study, 50 typical adults were presented with 70 nonwords and asked to name a similar-sounding real word for each item. Results indicated that participants changed an average of one segment per word, although a fifth of productions involved changing more than one of the segments; substitutions were the most common change. Targets that received a wide variety of responses and that did not phonologically resemble many real words resulted in the greatest number of changes. Using a single-segmental metric to index phonological similarity has its limitations, and may inadequately incorporate other influential elements of a word such as the frequencies of its neighbors.

Henson (1996) provided a number of demonstrations of error patterns in serial recall that contradict chaining models. One such error pattern concerned when participants make intrusions from prior lists: Rather than originating from random positions in the prior list, intrusions tend to be recalled in the same position as their position in the prior list, a finding which led to the endorsement of positional models of serial recall. However, all of the demonstrations of positional intrusions occurred in designs in which relatively small sets of items were repeatedly employed as stimuli. In recent years, a number of investigations have found evidence for chaining in designs in which large sets of items are employed and items are never reused across trials (open sets). We conducted 2 experiments using open sets of items to test whether a pure chaining model is a viable model for open-set conditions. Both experiments revealed that intrusions from the immediately preceding list exhibited a strong tendency to be output in the same position as their position in the prior list, suggesting the usage of positional representations in open-set designs. A chaining model that lacks positional representations provides an inadequate account of serial recall in open-set conditions.

A phonological similarity effect (PSE) in adolescents with an intellectual disability (ID) has previously been shown with auditory stimuli, but studies using visual stimuli are scarce. In the case of visually presented items, PSE requires verbal recoding before it appears. Using visual items, we trained 15 participants with ID to use rehearsal strategies. Another group of 13 participants took part in nonstrategic training. In both groups, PSE was tested before and after training. Participants in the strategy-training group, who showed no PSE at pretest, began to show such an effect during the training stage and maintained it until posttest as was observed through microgenetic analysis. Participants with ID showing no PSE with visual material can thus be trained to show this effect through extensive use of cumulative rehearsal. Such training would lead them to recode items verbally, which in turn would make phonological similarities more salient and lead to a PSE.

This study examined the timing of spontaneous self-monitoring in the naming responses of people with aphasia. Twelve people with aphasia completed a 615-item naming test twice, in separate sessions. Naming attempts were scored for accuracy and error type, and verbalizations indicating detection were coded as negation (e.g., "no, not that") or repair attempts (i.e., a changed naming attempt). Focusing on phonological and semantic errors, we measured the timing of the errors and of the utterances that provided evidence of detection. The effects of error type and detection response type on error-to-detection latencies were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. We first asked whether phonological errors and semantic errors differed in the timing of the detection process or repair planning. Results suggested that the two error types primarily differed with respect to repair planning. Specifically, repair attempts for phonological errors were initiated more quickly than repair attempts for semantic errors. We next asked whether this difference between the error types could be attributed to the tendency for phonological errors to have a high degree of phonological similarity with the subsequent repair attempts, thereby speeding the programming of the repairs. Results showed that greater phonological similarity between the error and the repair was associated with faster repair times for both error types, providing evidence of error-to-repair priming in spontaneous self-monitoring. When controlling for phonological overlap, significant effects of error type and repair accuracy on repair times were also found. These effects indicated that correct repairs of phonological errors were initiated particularly quickly, whereas repairs of semantic errors were initiated relatively slowly, regardless of their accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of self-monitoring and the role of speech error repair in learning.

It is important to distinguish between memory for item information and memory for order information when considering the nature of verbal short-term memory (vSTM) performance. Although other researchers have attempted to make this distinction between item and order memory in children, none has done so using process dissociation. This study shows that such an approach can be particularly useful and informative. Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) tend to experience a vSTM deficit. These two experiments explored whether phonological similarity (Experiment 1) and item frequency (Experiment 2) affected vSTM for item and order information in a group of individuals with DS compared with typically developing (TD) vocabulary-matched children. Process dissociation was used to obtain measures of item and order memory via Nairne and Kelley’s procedure (Journal of Memory and Language, 50 (2004) 113–133). Those with DS were poorer than the matched TD group for recall of both item and order information. However, in both populations, phonologically similar items reduced order memory but enhanced item memory, whereas high-frequency items resulted in improvements in both item and order memory—effects that are in line with previous research in the adult literature. These results indicate that, despite poorer vSTM performance in DS, individuals experience phonological coding of verbal input and a contribution of long-term memory knowledge to recall. These findings inform routes for interventions for those with DS, highlighting the need to enhance both item and order memory. Moreover, this work demonstrates that process dissociation is applicable and informative for studying special populations and children.

The effect of phonological similarity on L1-L2 cognate translation priming was examined with Japanese-English bilinguals. According to the phonological account, the cognate priming effect for different-script bilinguals consists of additive effects of phonological and conceptual facilitation. If true, then the size of the cognate priming effect would be directly influenced by the phonological similarity of cognate translation equivalents. The present experiment tested and confirmed this prediction: the cognate priming effect was significantly larger for cognate prime-target pairs with high-phonological similarity than pairs with low-phonological similarity. Implications for the nature of lexical processing in same-versus different-script bilinguals are discussed.

To recall a list of phonologically similar words is more difficult than to recall a list of phonologically dissimilar words; this is the well-known phonological similarity effect in verbal working memory. However, it is hypothesized that not all phonological aspects of a word would create the phonological similarity interference in verbal working memory. The present study examines the influence of different phonological characteristics of the to-be-memorized items on participants’ recall performance. Convergent results from two experiments revealed the phonological similarity effect was less evident with same tone materials. These results are discussed in terms of the role of tone in the phonological similarity effect in verbal working memory.

Verbal short-term memory, as indexed by immediate serial recall tasks (in which participants must recall several stimuli in order, immediately after presentation), develops considerably across middle childhood. One explanation for this age-related change is that children's ability to rehearse verbal material increases during this period, and one particularly influential version of this account is that only older children engage in any form of rehearsal. In this article, we critique evidence that is used to support the claim of age-related change in rehearsal and also critique the argument that children do not rehearse when engaged in immediate serial recall. This is not to say that rehearsal does not develop with age or that it is not required in any task, but to suggest that it plays little role in the development of verbal short-term memory performance as traditionally measured.

The effects of acoustic confusion (phonological similarity), word length, and concurrent articulation (articulatory suppression) are cited as support for Working Memory's phonological loop component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000 , Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 544). Research has focused on younger adults, with no studies examining whether concurrent articulation reduces the word length and acoustic confusion effects among older adults. In the current study, younger and older adults were given lists of similar and dissimilar letters (Experiment 1) or long and short words (Experiment 2) for immediate serial reconstruction of order. Items were presented visually or auditorily, with or without concurrent articulation. As expected, younger and older adults demonstrated effects of acoustic confusion, word length, and concurrent articulation. Further, concurrent articulation reduced the effects of acoustic confusion and word length equally for younger and older adults. This suggests that age-related differences occur in overall performance, but do not reflect an age-related deficiency in the functioning of the phonological loop component of working memory.

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.

Using the analytical methods of network science we examined what could be retrieved from the lexicon when a spoken word is misperceived. To simulate misperceptions in the laboratory, we used a variant of the semantic associates task—the phonological associate task—in which participants heard an English word and responded with the first word that came to mind that sounded like the word they heard, to examine what people actually do retrieve from the lexicon when a spoken word is misperceived. Most responses were 1 link away from the stimulus word in the lexical network. Distant neighbors (words >1 link) were provided more often as responses when the stimulus word had low rather than high degree. Finally, even very distant neighbors tended to be connected to the stimulus word by a path in the lexical network. These findings have implications for the processing of spoken words, and highlight the valuable insights that can be obtained by combining the analytic tools of network science with the experimental tasks of psycholinguistics.

Research into lexical processes shows that frequency and phonological similarity (neighborhood density) affect word processing and retrieval. Previous studies on inflectional morphology have examined the influence of frequency of occurrence in speech production on the inflectional verb paradigm in English. Limited work has been done to examine the influence of phonological similarity in languages with a more complex morphological system than English. The present study examined the influence of neighborhood density on the processing of Spanish Preterite regular and irregular verbs as produced by thirty native speakers of Spanish. The results of a naming task showed that regular verbs were processed faster and more accurately than irregular ones. Similar to what has been observed in English, a facilitative effect of neighborhood density for -ir verbs was observed in both regular and irregular verbs, such that -ir verbs with dense neighborhoods were produced faster and more accurately than -ir verbs with sparse neighborhoods. However, no neighborhood density effects were observed for -ar verbs (regular and irregular) in reaction times and accuracy rates. Thus, the activation of a specific -ir verb was facilitated by similar sounding verbs regardless of being regular and irregular. Implications for models of morphology language processing are discussed. Keywords: neighborhood density, language processing, Spanish. De acuerdo a investigacion llevada a cabo en torno a procesos lexicos, la frecuencia y la similitud fonologica (vecindario de densidad) afectan al acceso y procesamiento de palabras. Estudios previos sobre morfologia flexiva han examinado la influencia de la frecuencia de aparicion en actos de produccion de habla en el paradigma verbal flexivo del ingles. No existen muchos estudios que examinen la influencia de la similitud fonologica en lenguas con un sistema morfologico mas complejo que el que presenta el ingles. En este estudio se ha examinado la influencia de la densidad de vecindario en el procesamiento de verbos regulares e irregulares del espanol en formas de preterito por parte de treinta nativo hablantes del espanol. Los resultados en una tarea de naming mostraron que los verbos regulares se procesaron mas rapida y correctamente que los irregulares. Al igual que se ha observado en el ingles, se ha encontrado un efecto facilitador de densidad de vecindario en el caso de los verbos -ir, tanto en sus formas regulares como irregulares, de tal forma que los verbos -ir pertenecientes a un vecindario denso se produjeron mas rapida y correctamente que los verbos - ir en vecindarios ermitanos. No obstante, no se han observado efectos de vecindario lexico en los verbos -ar (regulares e irregulares) en cuanto a tiempos de reaccion e indices de precision. Asi pues, verbos similares en pronunciacion facilitaron la activacion de un verbo -ir especifico independientemente si el verbo era regular o irregular. Se plantean implicaciones en los modelos de procesamiento morfologico. Palabras clave: densidad de vecindario, procesamiento del lenguaje, espanol. How do we learn and process inflectional morphology? How do we transform the phonological form of a verb into its inflected form? These questions have attracted particularly contentious consideration over the past twenty years. The controversy raised a debate that applies to many aspects of language processing but has been expressed with specific reference to past-tense English verb processing. The debate refers to the existence of two competing theories found in the literature that try to address the question of how inflected word forms are mentally represented and processed, namely, dual-system and single-system theories. From the connectionist model approach initiated by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) followed by a critique by Pinker and Prince (1988), many articles have been published to account for regular and irregular verbs in English primarily. …

This paper argues that phonological similarity is evaluated over contrastive, phonological features. Evidence for this position is provided through analyses of consonant harmony processes. Typological studies of consonant harmony (Hansson, 2001, 2010; Rose and Walker, 2004) have shown that similarity plays a role in consonant harmony patterning with only highly similar segments interacting as targets and triggers. In this paper, two types of cases provide evidence that the relevant properties determining interacting segments are contrastive phonological representations. In one type of case (e.g. Bumo Izon), segments that appear to share a phonetic class with participating segments fail to participate in harmony. In the second type of case (e.g. Dholuo and Anywa), consonant harmony patterns differ between languages with similar phonetic inventories. A pair of segments in one language participates in harmony, and is thus evaluated as similar by the grammar. In another language, a phonetically identical pair fails to participate in harmony. In these cases, neither phonetic properties nor the model of phonological similarity proposed in Frisch et al. (2004) can account for the differences between languages. I propose that the underlying, phonological specifications differ from language to language accounting for the differences in the similarity evaluation.

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.

The current study examined the phonological and semantic contributions to the verbal short-term memory (VSTM) deficit in Down syndrome (DS) by experimentally manipulating the phonological and semantic demands of VSTM tasks. The performance of 18 individuals with DS (ages 11–25) and 18 typically developing children (ages 3–10) matched pairwise on receptive vocabulary and gender was compared on four VSTM tasks, two tapping phonological VSTM (phonological similarity, nonword discrimination) and two tapping semantic VSTM (semantic category, semantic proactive interference). Group by condition interactions were found on the two phonological VSTM tasks (suggesting less sensitivity to the phonological qualities of words in DS), but not on the two semantic VSTM tasks. These findings suggest that a phonological weakness contributes to the VSTM deficit in DS. These results are discussed in relation to the DS neuropsychological and neuroanatomical phenotype.

Background: While converging evidence has led to the view that people with aphasia exploit compositional procedures when producing compound words, the issue of what compound‐internal characteristics are at play during these procedures is still under debate. It has been argued that constituent position and/or morphosyntactic prominence, i.e., being the head constituent of a compound, may influence the manner in which compounds are accessed. However, findings obtained from patient performances are thus far inconclusive, because positional and headedness effects are frequently confounded in a language. Aims: In order to disentangle position‐in‐the‐string and headedness effects in compound production in aphasia, the main objective of this study is to investigate the performance of bilingual patients speaking languages in which these effects can be teased apart. Our secondary goal is to probe the roles of grammatical category (adjectives vs nouns) and of between‐language phonological similarity, as both these ...

Phonological short-term memory (pSTM), or the ability to hold information in mind for a few seconds, is investigated in deaf children fitted with a cochlear implant (CI children) before the age of 3 years, in the framework of Baddeley's model. Results show that, compared to their age-matched hearing controls, CI children are delayed in the development of their pSTM capacity, and exhibit reduced effect of phonological similarity (PSE) and word length (WLE). However, when CI children are matched for pSTM capacity with younger NH children, the difference regarding PSE and WLE disappear. The CI children do not produce more order errors than NH children. Taken together, the results indicate normal resources of functioning of pSTM. The reasons for the shorter pSTM span in CI children are discussed. © 2009 AELFA y Grupo Ars XXI de Comunicacion, S.L.

Phonological processing and short-term memory were investigated in a patient with slowly progressive anarthria. The patient, who had an auditory-verbal span in the lower unimpaired range, showed preserved phonological similarity and word length effects with auditory presentation. These phonological effects of immediate retention were absent with visual input. The patient was also unable to perform phonological judgments on written verbal material. Under unattended speech interference her visual span improved, with an increase of visual confusion errors. In the light of a model including a main auditory-verbal storage component (the phonological short-term input store, STS), and a rehearsal process, that, after phonological recoding, conveys visually presented verbal material to the phonological STS, the patient's pattern of impairment is interpreted as a selective deficit in the process of phonological recoding. This prevents visual-verbal material from accessing the phonological STS, that is, therefore, insulated from visual inputs.

Many models of immediate memory predict the presence or absence of various effects, but none have been tested to see whether they predict an appropriate distribution of effect sizes. The authors show that the feature model (J. S. Nairne, 1990) produces appropriate distributions of effect sizes for both the phonological confusion effect and the word-length effect. The model produces the appropriate number of reversals, when participants are more accurate with similar items or long items, and also correctly predicts that participants performing less well overall demonstrate smaller and less reliable phonological similarity and word-length effects and are more likely to show reversals. These patterns appear within the model without the need to assume a change in encoding or rehearsal strategy or the deployment of a different storage buffer. The implications of these results and the wider applicability of the distributionmodeling approach are discussed.

Jones, Hughes, and Macken (2007) claim that their data and our own are inconsistent with a multicomponent working-memory model. We explain in greater detail how the model can account for the data and can address their more specific criticisms. Both sides accept that data relating to the presence of a phonological similarity effect throughout the list depend on list length. We accept that, at this point, all explanations of their interaction are speculative and require further empirical investigation. We examine J, H, & M's interpretation of their and our results in terms of an auditory modality effect, observing that their interpretation of this effect is not well supported by the literature. We suggest that their account assumes a very narrow basis for a general theory of short-term retention, in contrast to a phonological loop interpretation, which forms part of a well-developed and articulated model of working memory.

This study explored whether earlier results of differential (harmful vs. helpful) short-term memory effects of shared syllables at nonword beginnings compared to ends could be replicated for lists of bisyllabic real words. We studied immediate serial recall of lists that had phonologically redundant syllables at the beginnings or ends of two-syllable words or nonwords. The results showed that redundancy at the beginning had a negative effect on both types of material. Redundancy at the end did not impair memory for nonwords but harmed the serial recall of words. Irrespective of lexicality, lists of beginning-redundant items were more difficult to recall than end-redundant items. The distribution of errors suggested that the better recall of end-redundant lists compared to beginning-redundant lists was related to a positive effect at encoding and/or retention, independent of effects at recall, for both words and nonwords.

English-Spanish bilinguals named visually presented words aloud in each language. The words included cognates (e.g., fruit-fruta) and non-cognate translations (e.g., pencil-ladpiz). The cognates were selected so that the orthographic and phonological similarity of their lexical form in each language varied orthogonally. Cognate naming latencies were influenced by the cross-language match of the orthographic and phonological codes. When the orthographic forms were similar in the two languages, naming latencies were slowed by dissimilar phonology, providing evidence for feed-forward activation from orthography to phonology across languages. When the orthographic forms were dissimilar, the effects of the corresponding phonological match were not statistically reliable. The results suggest that lexical access is non-selective across bilinguals' two languages, and that the degree of consistency between orthographic and phonological codes influences the manner in which cross-language competition is manifest. Fi...

The present study investigated an intriguing phenomenon that did not receive much attention so far: repeatedly calling a familiar person with someone else’s name. From participants’ responses to a questionnaire, these repeated naming errors were characterized with respect to a number of properties (e.g., type of names being substituted, error frequency, error longevity) and different features of similarity (e.g., age, gender, type of relationship with the participant, face resemblance and similarity of the contexts of encounter) between the bearer of the target name and the bearer of the wrong name. Moreover, it was evaluated whether the phonological similarity between names, the participants’ age, the difference of age between the two persons whose names were substituted, and face resemblance between the two persons predicted the frequency of error. Regression analyses indicated that phonological similarity between the target name and the wrong name predicted the frequency of repeated person naming errors. The age of the participant was also a significant predictor of error frequency: the older the participant the higher the frequency of errors. Consistent with previous research stressing the importance of the age of acquisition of words on lexical access in speech production, results indicated that bearer of the wrong name was on average known for longer than the bearer of the target name.