Mousikou Petroula, Roon Kevin D, Rastle Kathleen
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London.
Speech Production Laboratory, Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 May;41(3):636-49. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000072. Epub 2014 Dec 22.
Theories of reading aloud are silent about the role of subphonemic/subsegmental representations in translating print to sound. However, there is empirical evidence suggesting that feature representations are activated in speech production and visual word recognition. In the present study, we sought to determine whether masked primes activate feature representations in reading aloud using a variation of the masked onset priming effect (MOPE). We found that target nonwords (e.g., BAF) were read aloud faster when preceded by masked nonword primes that shared their initial phoneme with the target (e.g., bez), or primes whose initial phoneme shared all features except voicing with the first phoneme of the target (e.g., piz), compared with unrelated primes (e.g., suz). We obtained the same result in 2 experiments that used different participants and prime durations (around 60 ms in Experiment 1 and 50 ms in Experiment 2). The significant masked feature priming effect that was observed in both experiments converges with the empirical evidence in the speech production and visual word recognition domains indicating a functional role for features in reading aloud. Our findings motivate the further development of current theories of reading aloud and have important implications for extant theories of speech production.
大声朗读理论并未提及亚音素/亚片段表征在将印刷文字转换为声音过程中的作用。然而,有实证证据表明,特征表征在言语产生和视觉单词识别中会被激活。在本研究中,我们试图通过一种掩蔽起始启动效应(MOPE)的变体,来确定掩蔽启动刺激在大声朗读中是否会激活特征表征。我们发现,当目标非词(如BAF)之前出现与目标共享其首音素的掩蔽非词启动刺激(如bez),或其首音素与目标的首个音素共享除浊音外所有特征的启动刺激(如piz)时,与无关启动刺激(如suz)相比,目标非词的朗读速度更快。我们在两个实验中得到了相同的结果,这两个实验使用了不同的参与者和启动刺激持续时间(实验1约为60毫秒,实验2约为50毫秒)。在两个实验中观察到的显著掩蔽特征启动效应,与言语产生和视觉单词识别领域的实证证据相一致,表明特征在大声朗读中具有功能性作用。我们的研究结果推动了当前大声朗读理论的进一步发展,并对现有的言语产生理论具有重要意义。