Department of Psychology, Rice University Houston, TX, USA.
Front Psychol. 2011 Nov 4;2:319. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00319. eCollection 2011.
The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the number of lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, I found in two separate experiments a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like "He opens the gate." I also altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. That phonological information for post-verbal elements was activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb does not restrict the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that the phonological phrase is unit of planning, where all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Thus, consistent with other action sequencing behavior, there is significant phonological planning ahead in sentence production.
本研究探讨了自发句产生过程中语音规划的程度。先前的研究表明，在发音时，整个短语都会进行语音编码，但超出初始短语的编码可能是由于动词在规划语句时与语法的相关性。我进行了三项实验，以研究在单个语音短语中，语音规划是否跨越多个语法短语边界（由短语的词汇头数定义）。使用图片-单词干扰范式，我在两个独立的实验中发现，对于像“He opens the gate”这样的句子，动词和名词都存在显著的语音促进效应。我还改变了直接宾语的频率，并发现以低频对象结尾的句子比以高频对象结尾的句子需要更长的起始时间，这进一步支持了在起始发音时直接宾语已进行了语音编码的观点。对动词后元素的语音信息的激活表明，动词的语法重要性并不限制语音规划的程度。这些结果表明，语音短语是规划的单位，在发音之前会对语音短语中的所有元素进行编码。因此，与其他动作序列行为一致，在句子生成中有大量的语音规划提前进行。
