The syllable's role in speech production: Are syllables chunks, schemas, or both?

Two experiments, one using the masked priming technique combined with very brief prime exposures and the other using a new technique, the induction technique, were run in order to investigate the role of syllabic structure in speech production. Experiment 1 (masked priming) showed no effect when primes shared only the abstract syllabic structure without the phonological content, whereas the same picture stimuli produced a syllabic priming effect in Ferrand, Segui, and Grainger (1996, Experiment 4) when primes corresponded to full syllables. In contrast, the results of Experiment 2 (induction) showed that picture naming latencies were significantly faster when subjects had first read aloud a set of words with the same syllabic structure than when these words did not share the syllabic structure with the picture target. This result was also observed when the set was composed of nonwords. These results demonstrate that the abstract syllabic structure (independently of its phonological content) plays an important role in speech production depending on the task used.