Naming a picture is more difficult in the context of a
taxonomically-related picture. Disagreement exists on whether
non-taxonomic relations, e.g., associations, have similar or
different effects on picture naming. Past work has reported
facilitation, interference and null results but with inconsistent
methodologies. We paired the same target word (e.g., cow)
with unrelated (pen), taxonomically-related (bear), and
associatively-related (milk) items in different blocks, as
participants repeatedly named one of the two pictures in
randomized order. Significant interference was uncovered for
the same target item in the taxonomic vs. unrelated and
associative blocks. There was no robust evidence of
interference in the associative blocks. If anything, evidence
suggested that associatively-related items marginally
facilitated production. This finding suggests that taxonomic
and associative relations have different effects on picture
naming and has implications for theoretical models of lexical
selection and, more generally, for the computations involved in
mapping semantic features to lexical items.
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Behavioral interference or facilitation does not distinguish between competitive and noncompetitive accounts of lexical selection in word production.
One of the major debates in the field of word production is whether lexical selection is competitive or not. For nearly half a century, semantic interference effectsin picture naming latencieshave beenclaimed as evidence for competitive (relative threshold) models of lexical selection,while semantic facilitation effects have beenclaimed as evidence for non-competitive (simple threshold) models instead.In this paper, we use a computational modelingapproach to comparethe consequences of competitive and noncompetitive selection algorithms for blocked cyclic picture naming latencies, combined with two approaches to representing taxonomic and thematic semantic features.We show thatalthough our simplemodel can capture both semantic interference and facilitation,the presence or absence of competition in the selection mechanism is unrelated to the polarity of these semantic effects.These results question the validity of prior assumptions and offer new perspectives on the origins of interference and facilitation in languageproduction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1949631
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10292550
- Editor(s):
- Fitch, T.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic–phonetic models in more proficient listeners.
Significance Statement Behavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rjezp
