Padraig G. O'Seaghdha

Lehigh University · Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program

In Mandarin Chinese, speakers benefit from fore-knowledge of what the first syllable but not of what the first phonemic segment of a disyllabic word will be (Chen, Chen, & Dell, 2002), contrasting with findings in English, Dutch, and other Indo-European languages, and challenging the generality of current theories of word production. In this articl...

Form preparation in word production, the benefit of exploiting a useful common sound (such as the first phoneme) of iteratively spoken small groups of words, is notoriously fastidious, exhibiting a seemingly categorical, all-or-none character and a corresponding susceptibility to "killers" of preparation. In particular, the presence of a single exc...

Evidence that languages differ in the initial, proximate units of phonological encoding presents a challenge to current theories of language production. The proximate units principle is the idea that variation in the proximate, first selectable, phonological units during word form retrieval for speaking is key to understanding the implementation of...

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that the...

Theories of phonological encoding are centred on the selection and activation of phonological segments, and how these segments are organised in word and syllable structures in online processes of speech planning. The focus on segments, however, is due to an over‐weighting of evidence from Indo‐European languages, because languages outside this fami...

Language production entails selecting words in the face of internally, and sometimes externally, driven competition that influences the long-term accessibility of both selected words and competitors. Because both endogenous and externally presented competitors usually result in semantic interference, it is often assumed that they engage the same un...

Parallel accounts of interference resulting from the generation of related words can be found in the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) and the cumulative semantic interference literatures. Recent work on the language production side suggests that the same adaptive learning process may underlie both. However, the literatures remain separate. They u...

Preparation of unattached phonological fragments such as word-initial consonants has been conceived of as partial production and thus as revealing fundamental processes of phonological encoding in language production. However, recent evidence of flexible preparation (O’Séaghdha & Frazer, 2014) challenges the partial production view. Instead, prepar...

Speakers benefit from knowing how the words in a small set may begin. Previously, we found graded preparation in iterative picture and word naming (O’Seaghdha & Frazer, 2014), favoring an attentional account. Here we examined how preparation was modulated when consistent or inconsistent items were added to established sets (e.g., BOOT or TAIL added...

Conclusion: In the current study, we demonstrate both short-term and long-term structural priming effects in a single experiment. Consistent with some previous proposals we show that there are independent contributions to structural formulation from immediate priming and from cumulative adaptation. Thus, structural priming may not be a single unifi...

In form preparation, speakers predict how a word will begin before they know what the particular word will be. That is, they prepare a phonological fragment that pertains to several possible words. A standard account views preparation as partial production and therefore stipulates that the possible words must all share the fragment as well as relev...

Incremental learning explanations state that semantic interference is driven by activation levels of competitors. To explore nonsemantic contributions to interference, we examined the combined and separate effects of facilitatory phonological form preparation and semantic relatedness in a blocked cyclic picture naming procedure. Phonological simila...

Semantic interference during blocked cyclic picture naming has the potential to provide insights into underlying knowledge substrates. It may also provide insights into thematic or goal driven reconfigurations of meaning such as may occur during the pursuit of insight itself. We hypothesized that interference would arise due to adjustments in conce...

Semantic interference in word retrieval has been observed for both well-learned and ad hoc inter-item relations. We tested whether such semantic interference extends to the blocked cyclic naming of racially homogeneous vs. heterogeneous faces. No information except arbitrarily assigned names was provided for novel faces. Yet we observed interferenc...

Do Mandarin and English speakers think about time differently? The seminal work by Boroditsky (2001) claimed they do, but the claim did not stand in three failed replications (Chen 2007; January and Kako 2007; Tse and Altarriba 2008). Recently, new data from different tasks were interpreted as further support of the claim (Boroditsky, Fuhrman and M...

Expectations and judgments about the flow of time appear to be cognitively and culturally malleable. Here we explored the possibility that this malleability is responsive to relevant linguistic influences. Specifically, we hypothesized that an extended present time frame, which compresses imminent and completed events into the present, is the defau...

Converging evidence points to a difference between European and Chinese languages in the type of the initial units of phonological encoding for speaking. The phonological access points or “proximate units” (1, 2) are segmental in Indo-European languages but whole syllables in Chinese. Accordingly, Chinese speakers, unlike English speakers, do not r...

Chinese and English speakers seem to hold different conceptions of time which may be related to the different codings of time in the two languages. Employing a sentence–picture matching task, we have investigated this linguistic relativity in Chinese–English bilinguals varying in English proficiency and found that those with high proficiency perfor...

Structural priming, the tendency for speakers to reuse the structures of recent utterances (Bock, 1986) or to produce repeated structures more fluently, is well documented for structural selection, but less so for phrase structure generation. Priming of structural choices is long-lived, persisting across intervening utterances (Bock & Griffin, 2000...

Speakers appear to behave fastidiously in word preparation. For example, they fail to benefit when a set of words spoken in random order share the initial sound segment but one of them differs in spelling (Damian & Bowers, 2003). Thus, speakers, and perhaps action planners more generally, may categorically fail to plan when there is a “rotten apple...

Theories of language production are monolingual but the world is multilingual. In the domain of word-form encoding, it is clear that languages rely differentially on different phonological units, challenging the generality of the monolingual theories. To address this, we propose the proximate units principle, which holds that the initial selection...

Speakers benefit from knowing in advance how a word will begin (Meyer, 1990; O’Seaghdha & Chen, this conference). However, the ability to form a preparation set is limited: If one of several anticipated items is an “odd man out”, no plan is formed. Here, we show that this limitation arises in planning and not in execution. Participants prepared set...

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Ro...

Syntactic encoding creates a representation intermediate between a nonlinguistic conceptual level and a subsequent phonological level containing word forms. Lexical selection contributes to construction of a syntactic frame. Syntactic persistence, a form of implicit memory, suggests that syntactic structure is partly isolable from content. The rela...

Phonological competition theory states that competition among discrepant segments of similar words leads to inhibition of high-frequency word-naming responses in form-related priming tasks. If segments are selected sequentially, competition should be greater for begin-related pairs (storage-story), in which discrepant segments are late in the words...

The insistence on strict seriality and the proscription of feedback in phonological encoding place counterproductive limitations on the theory and WEAVER++ model. Parsimony cannot be stipulated as a property of the language system itself. Lifting the methodological prohibition on feedback would allow free exploration of its functionality in re...

Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long or "heavy" noun phrase direct objects at the end of a sentence rather than in the canonical post-verbal position. Three experiments using several task variations confirmed that length of the noun phrase influenced the ordering of the noun phrase and prepositional phrase during production. We...

Manipulating the semantic relatedness of noun and verb targets in contexts where they are grammatically appropriate or inappropriate allows for simultaneous examination of syntactic and semantic context effects. A lexical-decision experiment showed both a syntactic context effect and a semantic relatedness effect that was stronger in syntactically...

Many interactive activation theories state that activation of words entails concomitant activation of semantically related lexical items and thus indirectly of phonological relatives of the semantic relatives. That is, some degree of mediated semantic-phonological activation should occur. In contrast, discrete-stage accounts of lexical activation p...

in interactive activation models of language processing, inhibition is a molecular, quasi-neural process by which representational units send inhibitory signals to one another, or regulate their own activation by self-inhibition / in this chapter, we focus on the use of the concept of inhibition in the interactive activation literature, but we will...

We describe two primary stages in the top-down process of lexical access in production, a stage of lemma access in which words are retrieved as syntactic-semantic entities, and a stage of phonological access in which the forms of the words are fleshed out. We suggest a reconciliation of modular and interactive accounts of these stages whereby modul...

This chapter establishes a perspective on sentence-context research, primarily in terms of a contrast between a target-centered information-processing approach and a context-centered linguistics-based approach. In principle, and perhaps in the long historical perspective, all the fractions are identified as contributing to the scientific effort. Th...

Levelt et al. (1991) argued that modular semantic and phonological stage theories of lexical access in language production are to be preferred over interactive spreading-activation theories (e.g., Dell, 1986). As evidence, they show no mediated semantic-phonological priming during picture naming: Retrieval of sheep primes goat, but the activation o...

Context effects on lexical decision were analyzed by manipulating lexical relatedness and syntactic connectedness. Related and unrelated word pairs were embedded in syntactic (e.g., "the author of this book/floor") and in scrambled (e.g., "the author the and book/floor") phrases. The sequences were presented serially and subjects made lexical decis...