Dimensions of similarity in the mental lexicon

ABSTRACT

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbours) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remains unanswered. In the present study, we reanalyse phonetic data from a previous study, examining the contrasting predictions of different definitions of phonological similarity. Our results suggest that similarity at the level of position-specific phonological segments best predicts the influence of neighbour activation on phonetic properties of initial consonants.

KEYWORDS:

• Language production
• lexical-phonological neighbourhood
• lexical-phonetic variation
• interactive models
• lexical access

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of these analyses appeared in M. Fricke's PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. She gratefully acknowledges Susanne Gahl, Keith Johnson, Judy Kroll, Giuli Dussias and Matt Carlson for comments on earlier versions of this work. The authors also thank Ariel Goldberg and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The position-specific analyses here include only substitution neighbours. Analyses that included addition and deletion neighbours returned qualitatively similar results.

2. Contrary to Caselli et al. (2015), the present analyses do not distinguish between monomorphemic and morphologically complex neighbours. They also do not consider the role of neighbour orthographic similarity, which, as a reviewer points out, is an additional factor that could be at play.

3. A reviewer asks whether the any of the filler words were neighbours of targets (Jacobs, Yiu, Watson, & Dell, 2015). Additional analyses showed that very few neighbours appeared as fillers, and this factor was not a significant predictor of VOT.

4. A reviewer asks whether the VOT effect could be attributed to changes in overall speech rate. An earlier set of analyses found that the VOT effect remains significant when the rime duration of each word is included as a covariate (Fricke, 2013).

5. All results reported here included by-participant slopes for the critical predictors, but we note that the same results obtained whether these were included or not.

6. Most words (66 of 94) had a single consonant in final position. Qualitatively similar results were observed when restricting analysis to this subset.

7. As a reviewer points out, the greater range of VC neighbours in this data set may have played a role here. Future research should explicitly investigate this question.

Additional information

Funding

This writing of this paper was supported by NSF [grant number SMA-1409636] to M. Fricke, J. F. Kroll and P. E. Dussias, by NIH [grant number HD053146] to J. F. Kroll and by NIH [grant number HD077140] to M. Goldrick.