title: What are effective phonological units in Cantonese spoken word planning?
abstract: Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate the nature of effective phonological units in Cantonese spoken word production. The names of the pictures were Cantonese monosyllables with a consonant+vowel+consonant (CVC) structure. Participants' picture-naming responses were faster when the target (e.g., "star" /sing1/) and the distractor shared the same CVC component (e.g., /sing4/, meaning "city"), the same CV component (e.g., /sik6/, "eat"), or the same VC component (e.g., /ging2/, "region"), as opposed to when they were unrelated, and the facilitation effects observed were comparable in size. Also, similar facilitation effects were obtained across the CV+tone-related and the VC+tone-related conditions, whereas no reliable effect was found in the V+tone-related condition. These results indicate that an effective phonological unit in spoken word planning is neither a syllable (without tone) nor a segmental unit, and that the possible candidates lie between the two, at least in Cantonese.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Andus Wing-Kuen
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Hsuan-Chih
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013060:Speech