Mechanisms of interaction in speech production

Abstract

Many theories predict the presence of interactive effects involving information represented by distinct cognitive processes in speech production. There is considerably less agreement regarding the precise cognitive mechanisms that underlie these interactive effects. For example, are they driven by purely production-internal mechanisms (e.g., Dell, 1986) or do they reflect the influence of perceptual monitoring mechanisms on production processes (e.g., Roelofs, 2004)? Acoustic analyses reveal the phonetic realization of words is influenced by their word-specific properties-supporting the presence of interaction between lexical-level and phonetic information in speech production. A second experiment examines what mechanisms are responsible for this interactive effect. The results suggest the effect occurs on-line and is not purely driven by listener modeling. These findings are consistent with the presence of an interactive mechanism that is online and internal to the production system.

Figure 1

Mean VOT differences (word with minimal pair neighbor – word with no minimal pair neighbor), Experiment 1. Error bars represent standard error.

Figure 2

VOT ratio (word with minimal pair neighbor / word with no minimal pair), Experiment 1. Error bars represent standard error. The dashed line represents equivalent VOTs across conditions.

Figure 3

Raw VOTs for words in each condition, Experiment 2. Error bars represent standard error.

Figure 4

VOT ratio (relative to no competitor condition) for Experiment 2. Error bars represent standard error. The dashed line represents equivalent VOTs across conditions.