EXPRESS: Phonological encoding in Vietnamese: an experimental investigation

In English, Dutch, and other Germanic languages the initial phonological unit used in word production has been shown to be the phoneme; conversely, others have revealed that in Chinese this is the atonal syllable and in Japanese the mora. The current paper is, to our knowledge, the first to report chronometric data on Vietnamese phonological encoding. Vietnamese, a tonal language, is of interest as, despite its Austroasiatic roots, it has clear similarities with Chinese through extended contact over a prolonged period. Four experiments (i.e., masked priming, phonological Stroop, picture naming with written distractors, picture naming with auditory distractors) have been conducted to investigate Vietnamese phonological encoding. Results show that in all four experiments both onset effects as well as whole syllable effects emerge. This indicates that the fundamental phonological encoding unit during Vietnamese language production is the phoneme despite its apparent similarities to Chinese. This result might have emerged due to tone assignment being a qualitatively different process in Vietnamese compared to Chinese.

The effect of second-language orthographic input on the phonological encoding of Mandarin words

Previous studies have yielded mixed findings regarding the effect of familiar and novel L2 graphemes on learners’ phonological encoding. The current study investigated this topic by comparing the effect of Pinyin and Chinese characters on English speakers’ Mandarin word learning. Different from previous research, this study examined both segmental and tonal encoding and compared participants from different Mandarin proficiency levels. Seventeen Advanced learners, 29 Intermediate learners, and 21 Naïve English speakers participated in a word-learning experiment in which half of the participants were exposed to the Pinyin spelling of the target words while the other half to characters. After the learning phase, they did a meaning – auditory stimulus matching task. Half of the stimuli were complete matches, while in the other half the stimulus mismatched the target either in segments or tones. The results revealed that at the Advanced level, the Character group was more accurate than the Pinyin group in rejecting tonal mismatches to the target words, while the opposite tendency was observed at the Naïve level. This study suggests that novel graphemes facilitate advanced L2 learners’ tonal encoding more than familiar graphemes, which is probably due to the unique nature of Chinese characters.

The proximate unit in Korean speech production: Phoneme or syllable?

We investigated the “proximate unit” in Korean, that is, the initial phonological unit selected in speech production by Korean speakers. Previous studies have shown mixed evidence indicating either a phoneme-sized or a syllable-sized unit. We conducted two experiments in which participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed non-words. In English, for this task, when the picture (e.g., dog) and distractor phonology (e.g., dark) initially overlap, typically the picture target is named faster. We used a range of conditions (in Korean) varying from onset overlap to syllabic overlap, and the results indicated an important role for the syllable, but not the phoneme. We suggest that the basic unit used in phonological encoding in Korean is different from Germanic languages such as English and Dutch and also from Japanese and possibly also Chinese. Models dealing with the architecture of language production can use these results when providing a framework suitable for all languages in the world, including Korean.

Phoneme and Stress Programming Interact During Nonword Repetition Learning

Purpose Lexical stress and phoneme processes converge during phonological encoding, but the nature of the convergence has been debated. Stress patterns and phonemes may be integrated automatically and rigidly, resulting in a unified representation. Alternatively, stress and phoneme may be processed interactively based on sublexical contexts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent to which the lexical stress and phoneme processing interact in a novel nonword learning paradigm. Method Twenty-seven adults with typical speech skills were trained to produce nonwords with specific phonemes, syllables, and stress patterns (Set 1) to an accuracy criterion. Then, participants repeated nonwords that varied from Set 1 in syllable position (Set 2), phoneme sequence (Set 3), included new phonemes (Set 4), or had new phonemes and stress patterns (Set 5). Nonword productions were perceptually analyzed, and phoneme and stress errors were counted. Results Participants' produced Set 1 nonwords with few phonemic or stress errors after training; a similar number of both types of errors were produced when comparing Sets 2 and 3. Greater phoneme and stress errors were produced on nonwords from Sets 4 and 5 compared to Sets 1–3. The highest number of phonemic errors occurred in Set 4 nonwords. There was no difference in the number of stress errors produced on nonwords in Sets 4 and 5. Conclusion The results of this study suggested that lexical stress and phoneme processing co-occurred and interacted during nonword productions. Trained stress patterns were learned during training; however, no evidence for a unified representation was observed. Negative interference was observed in nonwords with new phonemes and trained stress patterns, suggesting online phoneme processing may have dominated and interfered with the retrieval of stored metrical frames.