A Word-Order Constraint in Single-Word Production?

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. 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, ηp 2 = .402; F2(1, 19) = 9.54, p < .007, ηp 2 = .334, but had no effect on object naming (the