The specific-word frequency effect in speech production: Evidence from Spanish and French

Abstract

The role of word frequency in lexical access during the production of homophones remains unresolved. In the current study, we address whether specific-word (the frequency of occurrence of the word “nun”) or homophone frequency (the summed frequency of words with the pronunciation /nΛn/) determines the production latencies of homophones. In Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a, participants named pictures of high-frequency (e.g., “banco”–a bank: financial institution) and low-frequency (e.g., “banco”–park bench) Spanish (Experiments 1a and 2a) or French (Experiment 3a) homophones and control pictures of nonhomophone words matched in frequency with each of the two uses of the homophones. The naming latencies for low-frequency homophones were longer than those for high-frequency homophones. Furthermore, the naming latencies for homophones were indistinguishable from those for nonhomophone controls matched in specific-word frequency. In Experiments 1b, 2b, and 3b, the participants performed either object decision or picture–word matching tasks with the stimuli used in the corresponding Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a. There were no reliable differences between high- and low-frequency homophones. The findings support the hypothesis that specific-word and not homophone frequency determines lexical access in speech production.

Keywords:

• Lexical access
• Picture naming
• Homophones

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant MEC–06–SEJ2006–06712 from the Spanish Government to F.C. and National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant DC04542 to A.C. We thank Petra Pajtas for editorial assistance.

Notes

¹ Caramazza et al. (2001) used both homographic and heterographic homophones and, in a post hoc analysis, found no differences between the two types of homophone.

² Learning times were not recorded in this experiment. However, in the Bonin and Fayol (2002) study, in which learning times were recorded, the analyses revealed that they had no impact on the picture-naming performance. Meyer and Damian (2007) have investigated the impact of the familiarization phase on picture-naming performance. Using the picture–picture interference paradigm, they failed to find an effect of the practice phase on naming times.

³ It could be argued that the name agreement scores distribution is somewhat reflected in the naming latencies. However, when these scores were introduced as a covariate in the by-item analyses, the pattern of results remained the same. Moreover, and importantly, low-frequency homophones were named more slowly than their matched cumulative frequency controls with name agreement scores controlled for: The name agreement scores did not reliably differ between high-frequency controls (76%) and low-frequency homophones (66%).

⁴ We have tested whether frequency trajectories (which according to Bonin, Barry, Méot, & Chalard, 2004, and Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002, is an objective operationalization of the age/order of acquisition of the words) varied as a function of homophony and word frequency for the items used in the French experiments. Frequency trajectory norms did not vary reliably on either dimension. Therefore, on this reasoning, the word frequency effects found in picture-naming latencies in Experiment 3a cannot be attributed to AoA/order of acquisition.