scholarly journals Is there phonological feature priming?

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karthik Durvasula ◽  
Alicia Parrish

AbstractWhile there is robust evidence of segment priming, particularly in some real word contexts, there is little to no evidence bearing on the issue of priming of subsegmental features, particularly phonological features. In this article, we present two lexical decision task experiments to show that there are no consistent priming effects attributable to phonological place of articulation features. Given that there is clear evidence of segment priming, but no clear evidence of priming due to other phonological representations, we suggest that it is doubtful that priming is a good tool to study phonological representations, particularly those that are not consciously accessible.

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catharina Casper ◽  
Klaus Rothermund ◽  
Dirk Wentura

Processes involving an automatic activation of stereotypes in different contexts were investigated using a priming paradigm with the lexical decision task. The names of social categories were combined with background pictures of specific situations to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic attributes (e.g., Bavarians – beer) emerged for fitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a marquee) but not for nonfitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a shop). Findings indicate that social stereotypes are organized as specific mental schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and context information.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIKO NAKAYAMA ◽  
STEPHEN J. LUPKER ◽  
YOSHIHIRO ITAGUCHI

The main fact that is currently known about the nature of masked L2-L1 noncognate translation priming effects in the lexical decision task is simply that those effects are significant in some studies but not in others. In an effort to better understand these effects, we examined the data pattern for very proficient Japanese–English bilinguals using RT distributional analyses. We also examined the impacts of prime and target frequency on the priming effect. Significant priming was present even on the fastest trials, becoming larger on slower trials. Nonetheless, priming effects were generally constant across prime and target frequency with the only exception being when very high frequency L2 primes were used. In that situation, priming and target frequency were negatively related, a result that essentially produced the observed pattern of increasing priming on slower trials. Implications of these results and potential reasons for the presence/absence of L2-L1 priming effects are discussed.


2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Dumay ◽  
Abdelrhani Benraïss ◽  
Brian Barriol ◽  
Cécile Colin ◽  
Monique Radeau ◽  
...  

Phonological priming between bisyllabic (CV.CVC) spoken items was examined using both behavioral (reaction times, RTs) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials, ERPs) measures. Word and pseudoword targets were preceded by pseudoword primes. Different types of final phonological overlap between prime and target were compared. Critical pairs shared the last syllable, the rime or the coda, while unrelated pairs were used as controls. Participants performed a target shadowing task in Experiment 1 and a delayed lexical decision task in Experiment 2. RTs were measured in the first experiment and ERPs were recorded in the second experiment. The RT experiment was carried out under two presentation conditions. In Condition 1 both primes and targets were presented auditorily, while in Condition 2 the primes were presented visually and the targets auditorily. Priming effects were found in the unimodal condition only. RTs were fastest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and slowest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. ERPs were recorded under unimodal auditory presentation. ERP results showed that the amplitude of the auditory N400 component was smallest for syllable overlap, intermediate for rime overlap, and largest for coda overlap and controls that did not differ from one another. In both experiments, the priming effects were larger for word than for pseudoword targets. These results are best explained by the combined influences of nonlexical and lexical processes, and a comparison of the reported effects with those found in monosyllables suggests the involvement of rime and syllable representations.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 699-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naira Delgado ◽  
Armando Rodríguez-Pérez ◽  
Jeroen Vaes ◽  
Jacques-Philippe Leyens ◽  
Verónica Betancor

Two experiments examine whether exposure to generic violence can display infrahumanization towards out-groups. In Study 1, participants had to solve a lexical decision task after viewing animal or human violent scenes. In Study 2, participants were exposed to either human violent or human suffering pictures before doing a lexical decision task. In both studies, the infrahumanization bias appeared after viewing the human violent pictures but not in the other experimental conditions. These two experiments support the idea of contextual dependency of infrahumanization, and suggest that violence can prime an infrahuman perception of the out-group. Theoretical implications for infrahumanization and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 1277-1291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Núria Sebastian-Gallés ◽  
Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells ◽  
Ruth de Diego-Balaguer ◽  
Begoña Díaz

Performance-based studies on the psychological nature of linguistic competence can conceal significant differences in the brain processes that underlie native versus nonnative knowledge of language. Here we report results from the brain activity of very proficient early bilinguals making a lexical decision task that illustrates this point. Two groups of Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant) were asked to decide whether a given form was a Catalan word or not. The nonwords were based on real words, with one vowel changed. In the experimental stimuli, the vowel change involved a Catalan-specific contrast that previous research had shown to be difficult for Spanish natives to perceive. In the control stimuli, the vowel switch involved contrasts common to Spanish and Catalan. The results indicated that the groups of bilinguals did not differ in their behavioral and event-related brain potential measurements for the control stimuli; both groups made very few errors and showed a larger N400 component for control nonwords than for control words. However, significant differences were observed for the experimental stimuli across groups: Specifically, Spanish-dominant bilinguals showed great difficulty in rejecting experimental nonwords. Indeed, these participants not only showed very high error rates for these stimuli, but also did not show an error-related negativity effect in their erroneous nonword decisions. However, both groups of bilinguals showed a larger correct-related negativity when making correct decisions about the experimental nonwords. The results suggest that although some aspects of a second language system may show a remarkable lack of plasticity (like the acquisition of some foreign contrasts), first-language representations seem to be more dynamic in their capacity of adapting and incorporating new information.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard VanNess Simmons

Summary This paper examines the origins and evolution of the Chinese linguistic concept known as the sìhū 四呼 “four types of rime onset” that is frequently applied to the description and analysis of Mandarin and Chinese dialect phonology. Through the examination of phonological texts primarily of the Míng (1368–1644) and Qīng (1644–1911) periods, the author follows the evolution of the sìhū as a phonological feature and outlines the development of the sìhū concept as well as the evolution of the actual term “sìhū” The underlying phonology of the sìhū emerged following the divergence of Mandarin from the other dialects in the Sòng (960–1279), through the Yuán (1271–1386), and into the Míng. The discovery and description of the sìhū was closely related to developments in phonological analysis made by Míng scholars as they departed from Middle Chinese tradition (of the 7th to the 12th centuries) and mapped out contemporary Mandarin pronunciation, especially that of the prestige Mandarin koinē known as Guānhuà. The emergence and description of the sìhū are thus found to parallel the evolution of Mandarin, as the phonological categories the sìhū represent evolved in concert with characteristic Mandarin features. The attention that Míng and Qīng scholars gave to the rime onset types of the sìhū analysis demonstrates that the phonological features represented by this four-way paradigm were considered to be important elements of contemporary forms of prestige Mandarin.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Pozzi ◽  
Robert Bayley

Abstract Although recent research suggests that gains are made in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad, the few studies that have been conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts have focused primarily on features characteristic of Spain. This article examines the L2 acquisition of phonological features characteristic of Buenos Aires Spanish, [ʃ] and [ʒ], known as sheísmo/zheísmo, for example the pronunciation of llave [ʝaβe] “key” as [ʃaβe] or [ʒaβe]. Participants include 23 learners of Spanish studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More than 4,800 tokens were gathered before, during, and at the end of the semester using sociolinguistic interviews, a reading passage, and a word list. These data were analyzed for the influence of linguistic and social factors using mixed-effects logistic regression (Rbrul; Johnson, 2009). Results suggest that participants approximate nativelike norms of use of these features and that time in country is a statistically significant predictor of patterns of phonological variation.


2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (11) ◽  
pp. 1669-1686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel G. Calvo ◽  
Michael W. Eysenck

To investigate the processing of emotional words by covert attention, threat-related, positive, and neutral word primes were presented parafoveally (2.2° away from fixation) for 150 ms, under gaze-contingent foveal masking, to prevent eye fixations. The primes were followed by a probe word in a lexical-decision task. In Experiment 1, results showed a parafoveal threat–anxiety superiority: Parafoveal prime threat words facilitated responses to probe threat words for high-anxiety individuals, in comparison with neutral and positive words, and relative to low-anxiety individuals. This reveals an advantage in threat processing by covert attention, without differences in overt attention. However, anxiety was also associated with greater familiarity with threat words, and the parafoveal priming effects were significantly reduced when familiarity was covaried out. To further examine the role of word knowledge, in Experiment 2, vocabulary and word familiarity were equated for low- and high-anxiety groups. In these conditions, the parafoveal threat–anxiety advantage disappeared. This suggests that the enhanced covert-attention effect depends on familiarity with words.


2001 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen R. A. de Bruijn ◽  
Ton Dijkstra ◽  
Dorothee J. Chwilla ◽  
Herbert J. Schriefers

Dutch–English bilinguals performed a generalized lexical decision task on triplets of items, responding with “yes” if all three items were correct Dutch and/or English words, and with “no” if one or more of the items was not a word in either language. Sometimes the second item in a triplet was an interlingual homograph whose English meaning was semantically related to the third item of the triplet (e.g., HOUSE – ANGEL – HEAVEN, where ANGEL means “sting” in Dutch). In such cases, the first item was either an exclusively English (HOUSE) or an exclusively Dutch (ZAAK) word. Semantic priming effects were found in on-line response times. Event-related potentials that were recorded simultaneously showed N400 priming effects thought to reflect semantic integration processes. The response time and N400 priming effects were not affected by the language of the first item in the triplets, providing evidence in support of a strong bottom-up role with respect to bilingual word recognition. The results are interpreted in terms of the Bilingual Interactive Activation model, a language nonselective access model assuming bottom-up priority.


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