Shared Unit: Onset

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3.2. Task 5: Shared Units Naming Task

By means of evidence in speech error, we want to know whether phonological units could imply significant effect, and what structural representations would play important role during word encoding. In this section, we also performed a naming experiment, but the visual stimuli were not color terms any longer. We designed some phonological groups of word lists, which shared certain kind of phonological structures with the color, to substitute for color terms.

In order to find a set of words to replace for the terms and to avoid the word frequency effect meanwhile, we had to choose the corresponding characters according to their frequency distribution from the “Word List with Accumulated Word Frequency in Sinica Corpus.” The shared unit task was designed to examine the issue of planning unit in word production. According to the phonological structure in Chinese syllable, we had six kinds of units to organize for the shared unit test in this study, which included onset, vowel, rhyme, bare syllable, bare tone, and tonal syllable (syllable + tone). The following will divided into six parts to describe the word designs of these structural representations. In order to look into how the segments are encoded into a phonological structure and how they interact within sound competition in visual perception, we excluded the factor of syllable structure in present study, though it is still important on the issue of the syllable unit in speech production to be chunk or schema.

3.2.1. Shared Unit: Onset

As reviewed in previous literature chapter, onset seems to be more likely to slip than non-initial ones (Dell & Juliano & Govindjee 1993). In this section, we would like to design a set of words which only share the part of onset with the color terms to substitute for the original visual terms. Table 3-17 lists the corresponding characters as well as their word frequencies, and their correlation analysis is given in Table 3-18.

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Table 3-17. Word list of onset sharing

Color Term 紅 棕 橙 黃 綠 藍 紫 灰 白 黑

IPA xoŋ35 tsoŋ55 tʂʰəŋ35 xwɑŋ35 ly51 lan35 tsɨ21 xwej55 paj21 xej55

Meaning red brown orange yellow green blue purple gray white black

Frequency 503 11 11 367 200 168 30 116 661 437

Onset Sharing 忽 宰 侈 毀 爐 撈 卒 禍 補 壺

IPA xu55 tsaj21 tʂʰɨ21 ^xwej21 lu35 lɑw55 tsu35 xwɔ51 pu21 xu35 Meaning sudden control luxury destroy stove scoop soldier trouble cram pot

Frequency 76 29 1 65 38 23 8 45 109 65

In Table 3-17, the lower row is the words that share the onset part with the corresponding color terms in upper row, as well as their respective frequency data.

Take the color red [xoŋ35] as example, “忽 [xu55]” is a word which shares only the onset segment [x]. Other aspects such as vowel, coda, tone and its phonological structure don’t overlap with those in the target term. Another example is the color green [ly51], in the case of the open syllable. We took the word "爐” [lu35] as the corresponding one because it shares the onset segment, without overlapping vowel and its tone. As to the compatibility of word frequency among the chosen characters, we examine their correlation with those of color terms by means of correlation test.

The mean scores of the two variables are 2.50 and 46.0 respectively, while the scores of standard deviation are 228.86 and 33.09 respectively. The Pearson correlation is .948 (p<.05), which reaches to the level of significance. It appears that the frequency distribution among the color terms correlates the distribution among the onset carriers positively and significantly (r=.948, p<.05).

Therefore, we adopted the words in Table 3-17 to substitute for the color terms of the naming test. For the actual stimuli design, we used the same sequence of the

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color trials in the former experiments into this phase, but two different rationales were applied in the design of this section. First, we don’t need to pair those color carriers as disyllable words. The eight characters were represented independently within a trial.

Second, after arranging the characters, we painted them in the target color of the carrier, instead of painting the term in another color in previous tests. For example, the following trial (i) is one of the samples in this unit sharing test and we painted the carriers in their target colors, while (c’) is the trial from the color reading test and characters were painted as the term indicated. We arranged the target colors in the same way as in (c’) for the colors of trial (i).

(c’) 黑黑黑灰灰灰黃黃黃紅紅紅灰灰灰紅紅紅黃黃黃灰灰灰

[xej55 xwej55 xwɑŋ35 xoŋ35 xwej55 xoŋ35 xwɑŋ35 xwej55]

‘Black gray yellow red gray red yellow gray’

(i) 壺壺壺禍禍禍毀毀毀忽忽忽禍禍禍忽忽忽毀毀毀禍禍禍

[xu35 xwɔ51 xwej21 xu55 xwɔ51 xu55 xwej21 xwɔ51]

‘Pot trouble destroy sudden trouble sudden destroy trouble’

Trial (c’) and (i) were painted in the same colors for each of the positions. We didn’t pair them into four phonological words as in (c). The visual color sequence of (i) was black, gray, yellow, red, gray, red, yellow, and gray. The color sequence not only accorded to the color terms in (c’), but also applied to the shared unit carriers of (i)—pot (壺), trouble (禍), destroy (毀), sudden (忽), trouble (禍), sudden (忽), destroy (毀), and trouble (禍).

Subjects still had to name the colors of those carriers, instead of reading the carrier words. There were 20 trials in total in this onset sharing section. All of the trials (20 in total) came from the former naming and reading experiments, but we

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didn’t reverse them to have another twenty. Among them, ten trials were recruited from the phonological group of high similarity, while the other ten came from the group of low similarity. In addition, the amount and target colors of trials in the following vowel sharing, rhyme sharing, syllable sharing, tone sharing, and tonal syllable sharing tests were organized in the same way. The differences among these unit sharing tests were not only the sharing structures, but also the individual set of word carriers for each unit.

In this shared unit naming task, we wanted to compare the naming precision and the speed of naming among the phonological units. In this part, we would like to know whether the shared unit, onset part, induced any effect on lexical processing and the pattern of speech errors as well as the amount.