The curious case of competition in Spanish speech production

Abstract

In previous studies in English examining the influence of phonological neighbourhood density in spoken word production, words with many similar sounding words, or a dense neighbourhood, were produced more quickly and accurately than words with few similar sounding words, or a sparse neighbourhood. The influence of phonological neighbourhood density on the process of spoken word production in Spanish was examined with a picture-naming task. The results showed that pictures with Spanish names from sparse neighbourhoods were named more quickly than pictures with Spanish names from dense neighbourhoods. The present pattern of results is the opposite of what has been previously found in speech production in English. We hypothesise that differences in the morphology of Spanish and English and/or the location in the word where phonological neighbours tend to occur may contribute to the processing differences observed in the two languages.

Acknowledgment

This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Kansas through the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) R01 DC 006472), the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development P30 HD002528), and the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (NIDCD P30 DC005803).

We would like to thank Allard Jongman, Joan Sereno, Holly Storkel, Jie Zhang, and the members of the Spoken Language Laboratory for helpful comments, suggestions, and discussions.

Notes

¹Although the accuracy rates in the present experiment may appear to be low (i.e., less than 90%), they are, in fact, comparable to the results from other picture naming studies (e.g., Experiments 3 and 4 in Vitevitch, Armbrüster & Chu, 2004). It should also be noted that in the present experiment one of the dense words was tarta and one of the sparse words was torta. In Castilian Spanish tarta means “cake” and torta means “pie.” However, in many Central and South American dialects of Spanish, the meanings of tarta and torta are reversed. Due to the different meanings across dialects, responses to these items from some participants were scored as “incorrect” as per Castilian Spanish, which was used to generate the stimulus items and score the items for accuracy. The results of all statistical analyses with those items excluded from all participants did not substantively change the present findings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael S. Vitevitch

Correspondence should be addressed to Michael S. Vitevitch, Spoken Language Laboratory, Department of Psychology, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. [email protected]