Presentation
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Blueberries and bunkbeds: what compounds can tell us about the time course of language production
Poster D4 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Clara Cuonzo1, London Dixon1, Ellen Lau1; 1University of Maryland
The aim of the present study is to contribute to understanding how language production unfolds over time by investigating ERP responses during the planning of compound nouns. In the language production literature, one common view is that a conceptual level of encoding is followed by a morphosyntactic level and then finally by a phonological one, concluding in actual articulation (see e.g., Levelt et al. 1999, Ferreira and Slevc 2007, Krauska 2022 a.o.). In the last decade or so, ERP studies of picture naming tasks inspired by these models have experimentally investigated the timeline of language production. For instance, Strijkers et al. (2010), examining data from Spanish-Catalan bilinguals, identified a 150-200ms window for the start of lexical access in production. Perret and Laganaro (2012), comparing a spoken versus written picture naming task, observed a divergence between the two modalities at around 260ms, which they identified as the beginning of the phonological phase for language production. However, it has been proven difficult to separate the morphosyntactic stage from the phonological one, given that production experiments usually concentrate on the naming of single words with limited morphosyntactic complexity. Compounds (e.g., ‘bunkbed’) are complex morphological objects composed of a head (‘bed’) and a modifier (‘bunk’) and thus provide the perfect testbed to investigate how linguistic complexity is dealt with in language production. EEG recordings will be conducted while participants name pictures whose labels are compounds, after hearing an auditory prime. There will be 4 different kinds of primes: semantic, morphological, phonological and unrelated. In the semantic condition, the prime and the target compound are related in meaning (‘dormitory’-‘bunkbed’), while in the morphological condition the prime is the same as the head of the compound (‘bed’-‘bunkbed’). In the phonological condition the prime shares the onset and the nucleus of the first syllable with the head of the compound (‘bent’-‘bunkbed’). Our analysis will focus on the ERPs from the onset of the picture to be named, during the planning stage in which speakers prepare their response prior to commencing articulation. Morphosyntactic and phonological planning should be facilitated in the morphological prime condition relative to the unrelated prime condition, due to the overlap at both those levels of representation. The crucial comparison will be between the phonological prime condition and the morphological prime one. If morphosyntactic planning precedes phonological planning, we predict that prime facilitation effects in the ERP should begin earlier in the morphological condition than in the phonological condition, thus pinpointing the time course of the morphosyntactic level postulated in language production models. In sum, the present work intends to contribute to the field’s understanding of how production unfolds over time by using compound nouns which show morphological complexity at the world level.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Morphology