Figure 1.

Time course of encoding and articulation for regular and irregular words. The top of the figure shows the putative time-course of phonological encoding of monosyllabic words (1 regular word and 3 irregular words) that are 4 segments long (each segment labeled S1, S2, S3, or S4) assuming a parallel encoding scheme. For the 3 irregular words, the irregular segment which occurs at position 1, 2, or 3, is indicated by an “^*.” On each segment's time-course of phonological encoding, the white triangle depicts the increase in activation of the correct segment, and the base of the triangle on the right side of the triangle depicts when that segment reaches threshold. Below the sets of time-courses of encoding at the bottom of the figure are the time-courses of articulation on the same time-scale as the phonological encoding assuming the segment as the planning unit (i.e., the criterion to initiate articulation). The vertical bar corresponds to the point in time when the 1st segment reaches threshold based on the time-course of encoding above, with the white and gray rectangles corresponding to to the duration of the 1st and 2nd segments. The “n” and “p” at the left and right edges of the white rectangle corresponds to the acoustic onset for non-plosive and plosive initial segments, respectively.