Abstract
A recent study showed that the pronunciation of the definite article in English (as either a reduced “thuh” or an unreduced “thee”) depends on a number of different factors, including the pronunciation, spelling, and stress assignment of the following word (Raymond, Fisher, & Healy, 2002). However, it is not clear from previous research whether these factors influenced performance implicitly in normal speech production or whether explicit knowledge of the object of the experiment was relied on. In Experiment 1, we examined implicit performance on pronunciation of the definite article and found more systematic behavior than had previously been observed but, again, an influence of the pronunciation, spelling, and stress assignment of the following word. In Experiment 2, we tested the influence of the following word on definite article production during language development for two groups of children 8 and 10 years of age. This experiment showed increasing use of the unreduced form during development and a further influence of orthography. We interpret these results in terms of an interaction between perception and production in which the production system makes use of generalizations on the basis of both phonological and orthographic representations generated in perception.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical database [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium.
Bell, A., Jurafsky, D., Fosler -Lussier, E., Girand, C., & Gildea, D. (1999). Forms of English function words: Effects of disfluencies, turn position, age and sex, and predictability. InProceedings of the XIV International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 395–398). Berkeley: University of California, Linguistics Department.
Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview.Phonetica,49, 155–180.
Bruck, M. (1992). Persistence of dyslexics’ phonological awareness deficits.Developmental Psychology,28, 874–886.
Bybee, J. [L.] (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon.Language & Cognitive Processes,10, 425–455.
Bybee, J. L., & Slobin, D. I. (1982). Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense.Language,58, 265–289.
Damian, M. F., & Bowers, J. S. (2003). Effects of orthography on speech production in a form preparation paradigm.Journal of Memory & Language,49, 119–132.
Dijkstra, T., Roelofs, A., & Fieuws, S. (1995). Orthographic effects on phoneme monitoring.Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology,49, 264–271.
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,35, 116–224.
Fox Tree, J., & Clark, H. (1997). Producing “the” as “thee” to signal problems in speaking.Cognition,16, 151–167.
Godfrey, J., Holliman, E., & McDaniel, J. (1992). SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. InIEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing ’92 (pp. 517–520). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press.
Goswami, U., & Bryant, P. E. (1990).Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove, U. K.: Erlbaum.
Guy, G., & Boyd, S. (1990). The development of a morphological class.Language Variation & Change,2, 1–18.
Hallé, P. A., Chéreau, C., & Segui, J. (2000). Where is the /b/ in “absurde” [apsyrd]? It is in French listeners’ minds.Journal of Memory & Language,43, 618–639.
Hare, M., & Elman, J. L. (1995). Learning and morphological change.Cognition,56, 61–98.
Jakobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, M. (1952).Preliminaries to speech analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Fosle-Lussier, E., Girand, C., & Raymond, W. (1998). Reduction of English function words in Switchboard. In R. H. Mannell & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.),Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 3111–3114). Sydney: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.
Keating, P., Byrd, D., Fleming, E., & Todaka, Y. (1994). Phonetic analysis of the TIMIT corpus of American English.Speech Communications,14, 131–142.
Kuÿcera, H., & Francis, W. N. (1967).Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.
Labov, W. (1969). Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula.Language,45, 715–762.
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production.Behavioral & Brain Sciences,22, 1–38.
Lukatela, G., Eaton, T., Lee, C., & Turvey, M. T. (2001). Does visual word identification involve a sub-phonemic level?Cognition,78, B41-B52.
Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T. (1994). Visual lexical access is initially phonological: 2. Evidence from phonological priming by homophones and pseudohomophones.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,123, 331–353.
Maratsos, M. (2000). More overregularizations after all: New data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu.Journal of Child Language,27, 183–212.
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language-acquisition.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development,57, R5-R165.
Mathews, R. C., Buss, R. R., Stanley, W. B., Blanchard-Fields, F., Cho, J. R., & Druhan, B. (1989). Role of implicit and explicit processes in learning from examples: A synergistic effect.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,15, 1083–1100.
McClelland, J. L., & Patterson, K. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out?Trends in Cognitive Sciences,6, 465–472.
Morais, J., & Kolinsky, R. (1994). Perception and awareness in phonological processing: The case of the phoneme.Cognition,50, 287–297.
Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense.Trends in Cognitive Sciences,6, 456–463.
Raymond, W. D., Fisher, J. A., & Healy, A. F. (2002). Linguistic knowledge and language performance in English article variant preference.Language & Cognitive Processes,17, 613–662.
Reber, A. S. (1997). Implicit ruminations.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,4, 49–55.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1979). Orthographic effects on rhyme monitoring.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory,5, 546–554.
Selkirk, E. (1984).Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Serwatka, M., & Healy, A. F. (1998). On the status of the count-mass distinction in the mental grammar. In A. F. Healy & L. E. Bourne, Jr. (Eds.),Foreign language learning: Psycholinguistic studies on training and retention (pp. 113–158). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Stone, G. O., Vanhoy, M., & Van Orden, G. C. (1997). Perception is a two-way street: Feedforward and feedback phonology in visual word recognition.Journal of Memory & Language,36, 337–359.
Todaka, Y. (1992). Phonetic variants of the determiner “the”.UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics,81, 39–47.
Treiman, R., & Cassar, M. (1997). Can children and adults focus on sound as opposed to spelling in a phoneme counting task?Developmental Psychology,33, 771–780.
vanOrden, G. C. (1987). A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading.Memory & Cognition,15, 181–198.
Wulf, G., McNevin, N., & Shea, C. H. (2001). The automaticity of complex motor skill learning as a function of attentional focus.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,54A, 1143–1154.
Ziegler, J. C., & Ferrand, L. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory word recognition.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,5, 683–689.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gaskell, M.G., Cox, H., Foley, K. et al. Constraints on definite article alternation in speech production: To “thee” or not to “thee”?. Memory & Cognition 31, 715–727 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196110
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196110