Phonological activation of category coordinates during speech planning is observable in children but not in adults: evidence for cascaded processing.
There is a long-standing debate in the area of speech production on the question of whether only words selected for articulation are phonologically activated (as maintained by serial-discrete models) or whether this is also true for their semantic competitors (as maintained by forward-cascading and interactive models). Past research has addressed this issue by testing whether retrieval of a target word (e.g., cat) affects--or is affected by--the processing of a word that is phonologically related to a semantic category coordinate of the target (e.g., doll, related to dog) and has consistently failed to obtain such mediated effects in adult speakers. The authors present a series of experiments demonstrating that mediated effects are present in children (around age 7) and diminish with increasing age. This observation provides further evidence for cascaded models of lexical retrieval.
Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. jdj@uni-leipzig.de
Jörg D
JD
Jescheniak
Anja
A
Hahne
Stefanie
S
Hoffmann
Valentin
V
Wagner
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement / Q000379:methods; D013997:Time Factors