Characterizing the motor execution stage of speech production: consonantal effects on delayed naming latency and onset duration

The research described in this article had 2 aims: to permit greater precision in the conduct of naming experiments and to contribute to a characterization of the motor execution stage of speech production. The authors report an exhaustive inventory of consonantal and postconsonantal influences on delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration, derived from a hand-labeled corpus of single-syllable consonant-vowel utterances. Five talkers produced 6 repetitions each of a set of 168 prepared monosyllables, a set that comprised each of the consonantal onsets of English in 3 vowel contexts. Strong and significant effects associated with phonetic characteristics of initial and noninitial phonemes were observed on both delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration. Results are discussed in terms of the biomechanical properties of the articulatory system that may give rise to these effects and in terms of their methodological implications for naming experiments.