To appear in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition The specific-word frequency effect: Implications for the representation of homophones in speech production

نویسندگان

  • Alfonso Caramazza
  • Albert Costa
  • Michele Miozzo
  • Yanchao Bi
چکیده

2 Abstract A series of experiments investigated whether naming latencies for homophones (e.g., /nΛn/) are a function of specific-word frequency (i.e., the frequency of nun) or a function of cumulative-homophone frequency (i.e., the sum of the frequencies of nun and none). Specific-word but not cumulative-homophone frequency affected picture-naming latencies. This result was obtained in two languages (English and Chinese). An analogous finding was obtained in a translation task, where bilingual speakers produced the English names of visually presented Spanish words. Control experiments ruled out that these results are an artifact of orthographic or articulatory factors, or of visual recognition. The results argue against the hypothesis that homophones share a common word-form representation, and support instead a model in which homophones have fully independent representations. 3 Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but differ in meaning, spelling, or grammatical class. How are homophones represented and accessed in speech production? Two hypotheses have been proposed. One view holds that homophones share a common lexical-phonological representation, but because they have different meanings and often also different grammatical properties (e.g., sun/son; the watch/to watch; him/hymn), they have different semantic and lexical-grammatical representations 1. We will call models of this type " shared representation " (SR) models. There are four levels of representation in these models: semantic/conceptual nodes, lemma nodes, lexeme nodes, and phonological nodes. Lemmas specify the word's grammatical properties, while lexemes specify their phonological contents. Figure 1a schematically represents this hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis attributes no special status to homophones. Each word, homophonic and non-homophonic, is represented independently (Caramazza, 1997; Harley, 1999). We will call models of this type " independent representation " (IR) models. One such proposal is schematically represented in Figure 1b. Here there are only three levels of representation in lexical access: semantic/conceptual nodes, lexical nodes, and phonological nodes. The results of two recent studies have been interpreted as providing support for the SR Both studies investigated the effects of homophone frequency on naming performance. Given the assumption that homophones share a 1 Note that whether homophonic words are homographic (the watch/to watch) or heterographic (him/hymn) has not been considered to be a relevant factor in theories of lexical access in speech production. Nevertheless, below we will consider the possible role of orthographic form in theories of phonological lexical access. 4 Figure 1a Figure 1b Figure 1. Schematic representation of the Shared and Independent representation hypotheses. common representation, …

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تاریخ انتشار 2001