Priming in Pronunciation: Beyond Pattern Recognition and Onset Latency

Three experiments that address the impact of associative relatedness on both onset latencies and production durations in pronunciation performance are reported. In Experiment 1, a related response cue, presented afer a to-be-pronounced target word, decreased the target word’s production duration, compared to an unrelated response cue, but did not influence its onset latency. In Experiment 2, two related or two unrelated words were simultaneously presented. The response cue was presented 400,900, 1400, or 1900 ms after the stimuli were presented and indicated whether to pronounce the stimuli in a prepared sequence or in an unprepared sequence. The results indicated that the production durations were shorter when the two words were related, compared to unrelated, independent of cue delay. Also, the onset latencies were faster when the words were related compared to unrelated at each delay except the 1900-ms delay. In Experiment 3, three word sequences were presented to distinguish between associative-cooccurrence accounts and meaninglevel accounts of the results obtained in Experiments 1 and 2. The results of Experiment 3 yielded a significant impact of the primes on both onset latencies and production durations. The pattern of priming effects supported a meaning-level account of the present production duration effects. The results from these experiments are interpreted within both an interactive activation model of speech production and a cooperative-based model of language processing.