Commentary

A Word-Order Constraint in Single-Word Production? Failure to Replicate Janssen, Alario, and Caramazza (2008)

Psychological Science 22(4) 559­–561 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0956797611401754 http://pss.sagepub.com

Nicolas Dumay1 and Markus F. Damian2 1

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia, Spain, and 2School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol

Received 10/14/10; Revision accepted 12/16/10

Janssen, Alario, and Caramazza (2008) reported finding that word order constrains the activation of lexical and phonological representations even in the production of isolated words. In their experiments, French or U.S. English speakers named the color or the object depicted in colored-picture displays; in some cases, the color name started with the same sound as the object name. French speakers named colors faster in the phonologically congruent condition (e.g., stimulus: robe rouge, “red dress”; correct response: “rouge”) than in the incongruent condition (e.g., stimulus: vache rouge, “red cow”; correct response: “rouge”; see Navarrete & Costa, 2005, for similar results in Spanish), but showed no difference between conditions for object naming (e.g., stimulus: robe rouge; correct response: “robe”). Intriguingly, English speakers showed the reverse pattern: Phonological congruency sped up their naming of objects, but not their naming of colors. Janssen et al. interpreted their findings in terms of language-specific syntactic constraints: Given that nouns typically precede color adjectives in French, activation of the noun’s phonology is initially favored over that of the adjective, and, as a result, activation of the object name influences retrieval of the color name, whereas the reverse is not possible. In English, by contrast, because modifying adjectives systematically occur before their nouns, the exact mirror pattern is observed. The proposed account, however, does not fit with recent data reported by Kuipers and La Heij (2009) for speakers of Dutch, which like English uses only prenominal adjectives. Kuipers and La Heij found that color naming rather than object naming benefited from overlap of the initial sounds—the same pattern Janssen et al. (2008) observed in French speakers. The inconsistency between the English and Dutch findings cannot be explained simply by invoking the fact that in Dutch, as in French, adjectives inherit the gender of their nouns. Gender agreement could indeed create the conditions of phonological facilitation from the noun to the prenominal adjective; however, as Janssen et al. themselves pointed out (p. 219), there is no reason why this process should eliminate, or even reduce, the phonological effect in object naming. The data reported by Janssen et al. (2008) are also incompatible with our own independent attempt to find an influence

of color on single-word object naming in U.K. English speakers. To test this possible influence, we used 20 colored line drawings of common objects with monosyllabic names (CELEX frequency: 18 per million; length: 3.5 phonemes; Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikens, 1995). These drawings are known to induce phonological facilitation in colored-object naming experiments in which participants are asked to name both the color and the object in each drawing (adjective plus noun: e.g., “red rat” vs. “blue rat”; Damian & Dumay, 2007; see also Damian & Dumay, 2009; Dumay, Damian, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Perez, 2009). To maximize the chance of color affecting noun retrieval in the present experiments, we rendered color more salient by coloring the entire drawings instead of just the lines. As in the experiments of Janssen et al., participants had to name either the color or the object depicted in colored-picture displays; task (color or object naming) was manipulated between participants, and phonological congruency was manipulated within participants. Forty-eight native U.K. English speakers were assigned randomly to one or the other task. Each object was presented once in a congruent trial, once in an incongruent trial, and four times in filler trials (which used two colors that were phonologically unrelated to the objects). Trial order was pseudorandomized for each participant so that neither the same color nor the same object appeared on consecutive trials. The first author, who was blind to the experimental condition, hand-measured all latencies directly from the response spectrograms.1 As in Janssen et al. (2008), latencies longer than 3 standard deviations above each participant’s conditional mean (1.3%) were excluded. As shown in Figure 1a, we found an asymmetry exactly opposite to that observed by Janssen et al.: Phonological congruency sped up color naming by 25 ms on average, F1(1, 23) = 15.46, p < .001, ηp2 = .402; F2(1, 19) = 9.54, p < .007, ηp2 = .334, but had no effect on object naming (the

Corresponding Author: Nicolas Dumay, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain E-mail: [email protected]

560

a

Dumay, Damian

700

Congruent

680

Incongruent

Latency (ms)

660 640 620 600 580 560 540 520

b

700 680

Latency (ms)

660

Color Naming

Object Naming

Congruent Incongruent

640 620 600 580 560 540 520

Color Naming

Object Naming

Fig. 1.  Mean color- and object-naming latencies on congruent and incongruent trials. The graph in (a) shows results obtained using the material from Damian and Dumay (2007, Experiment 3); the graph in (b) shows results obtained using the original material of Janssen, Alario, and Caramazza (2008, Experiment 2). Error bars show standard errors.

difference was only 1 ms in the same direction; both Fs < 1). The differential impact of sound overlap in the two tasks was confirmed by the significant interaction between task and congruency, F1(1, 46) = 9.12,  p < .005,   ηp2 = .165; F2(1, 19) = 6.86, p < .02, ηp2 = .265. Error rates (1.3% overall) showed no effect of congruency in either task. As colors were named faster than objects, the absence of an effect in object naming cannot be due to color processing being slower than object processing. Given the discrepancy between the findings of Janssen et al. (2008) for English speakers and our own findings in this language (as well as the findings of Kuipers and La Heij, 2009, for Dutch speakers), we reran the original experiment of Janssen et al. using the original materials and procedural

settings, which the authors kindly provided. Again, we tested two groups of 24 U.K. participants. One item (“pitcher”) rarely used in U.K. English and named erroneously more than 50% of the time was excluded from the analyses. Outliers excluded from the chronometric analysis represented 1.5% of the data. As shown in Figure 1b, latencies once again exhibited an asymmetry opposite to the one originally reported by Janssen et al.: Phonological congruency facilitated color naming by an average of 22 ms, F1(1, 46) = 9.46, p < .004, ηp2 = .171; F2(1, 38) = 9.13, p < .007, ηp2 = .176, but did not facilitate object naming (the difference was 1 ms in the opposite direction; both Fs < 1). Again, the interaction between task and congruency was significant, F1(1, 46) = 5.50, p < .03, ηp2 = .107; F2(1, 38) = 4.74, p < .04, ηp2 = .111. Error rates (1.6% overall) showed no effect of congruency in either task. As in our first experiment, color naming was thus definitely more sensitive than object naming to overlap of the initial sound. Using both our own materials and those of Janssen et al. (2008), we reproduced in English speakers the same asymmetry observed in French and Dutch speakers. Consequently, our two data sets cast doubt on the original findings of Janssen et al. and challenge their word-order-constraint hypothesis. At present, their data for English constitute the only piece of evidence that the order of the words in a language affects how single-word utterances are produced. Leaving out these results, the data show that for coloredobject stimuli, object naming is impervious to sound similarities between color adjectives and object labels, whereas color naming is definitely influenced by object labels. The best account of these data assumes that object identity always has priority in the cascading of information from the conceptual to the phonological level (cf. La Heij, Boelens, & Kuipers, 2007). In a sense, this conclusion is perhaps not so surprising: From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to identify surrounding elements (and the threat that these may represent) should be the chief priority in communication; under such a view, syntax should have little chance to constrain the cascading of information in speech production. Acknowledgments This research was carried out at the University of Kent. The authors thank Sian Bloomfield, Michelle Borthwick, and Harriet Norcott for their help with data collection.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding This research was supported by a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/C508477/1) to the second author.

A Word-Order Constraint in Single-Word Production? Note 1.  To check the reliability of these measurements, another researcher remeasured one third of the data from the second experiment (1,280 data points); the correlation between these and the original measurements (r = .98) indicates near-perfect agreement.

References Baayen, R.H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikens, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database (Release 2) [CD ROM]. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium. Damian, M.F., & Dumay, N. (2007). Time pressure and phonological advance planning in spoken production. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 195–209. Damian, M.F., & Dumay, N. (2009). Exploring phonological encoding through repeated segments. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 685–712. Dumay, N., Damian, M.F., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Perez, M.A. (2009). Is the scope of phonological encoding constrained by the

561 syntactic role of the utterance constituents? In N.A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 667–672). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Janssen, N., Alario, F.-X., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A word-order constraint on phonological activation. Psychological Science, 19, 216–220. Kuipers, J.-R., & La Heij, W. (2009). The limitations of cascading in the speech production system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 120–135. La Heij, W., Boelens, H., & Kuipers, J.-R. (2007). Automatic naming of ignored pictures? Evidence from children and adults. In J. Grainger, F.-X. Alario, B. Burle, & N. Janssen (Eds.), Abstracts of the 15th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (p. 52). Marseille, France: Université de Provence. Navarrete, E., & Costa, A. (2005). Phonological activation of ignored pictures: Further evidence for a cascade model of lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 359–377.