Inhibitory form priming of spoken word production

Abstract

Three experiments were designed to examine the effect on picture naming of the prior production of a word related in phonological form. In Experiment 1, the latency to produce Dutch words in response to pictures (e.g., hoed, hat) was longer following the production of a form-related word (e.g., hond, dog) in response to a definition on a preceding trial, than when the preceding definition elicited an unrelated word (e.g., kerk, church). Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inhibitory effect disappears when one unrelated word is produced intervening prime and target productions (e.g., hond-kerk-hoed). The size of the inhibitory effect was not significantly affected by the frequency of the prime words or the target picture names. In Experiment 3, facilitation was observed for word pairs that shared offset segments (e.g., kurk-jurk, cork-dress), whereas inhibition was observed for shared onset segments (e.g., bloed-bloem, blood-flower). However, no priming was observed for prime and target words with shared phonemes but no mismatching segments (e.g., oom-boom, uncle-tree; hex-hexs, fence-witch). These findings are consistent with a process of phoneme competition during phonological encoding.