The influence of task demands on the preparation of spoken word production: Evidence from Korean

It was shown in speech production studies that the preparation unit of spoken word production is language particular, such as onset phonemes for English and Dutch, syllables for Mandarin Chinese, and morae for Japanese. However, there have been inconsistent results on whether the onset phoneme is a planning unit of spoken word production in Korean. In this study, two sets of experiments investigated possible influences of task demands on the phonological preparation in native Korean adults, namely, implicit priming and word naming with the form preparation paradigm. Only the word naming task, but not the implicit priming task, showed a significant onset priming effect, even though there were significant syllable priming effects in both tasks. Following the attentional theory ($O^{\prime}S{\acute{e}}aghdha$ & Frazer, 2014), these results suggest that task demands might play a role in the absence/presence of onset priming effects in Korean. Native Korean speakers could maintain their attention to the shared onset phonemes in word naming, which is not very demanding, while they have difficulties in allocating their attention to such units in a more cognitive-demanding implicit priming, even though both tasks involve accessing phonological codes. These findings demonstrate that there are cross-linguistic differences in the first selectable unit in preparation of spoken word production, but within a single language, the preparation unit might not be immutable.