No abstract

Language production experiments with overt articulation have thus far only scarcely been conducted online, mostly due to technical difficulties related to measuring voice onset latencies. Especially the poor audiovisual synchrony in web experiments (Bridges et al. 2020) is a challenge to time-locking stimuli and participants’ spoken responses. We tested the viability of conducting language production experiments with overt articulation in online settings using the picture–word interference paradigm – a classic task in language production research. In three pre-registered experiments (N = 48 each), participants named object pictures while ignoring visually superimposed distractor words. We implemented a custom voice recording option in two different web experiment builders and recorded naming responses in audio files. From these stimulus-locked audio files, we extracted voice onset latencies offline. In a control task, participants classified the last letter of a picture name as a vowel or consonant via button-press, a task that shows comparable semantic interference effects. We expected slower responses when picture and distractor word were semantically related compared to unrelated, independently of task. This semantic interference effect is robust, but relatively small. It should therefore crucially depend on precise timing. We replicated this effect in an online setting, both for button-press and overt naming responses, providing a proof of concept that naming latency – a key dependent variable in language production research – can be reliably measured in online experiments. We discuss challenges for online language production research and suggestions of how to overcome them. The scripts for the online implementation are made available.

The role of meaning facets based on sensorimotor experiences is well-investigated in comprehension but has received little attention in language production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether experiential traces of space influenced lexical choices when participants completed visually-presented sentence fragments (e.g., ‘You are at the sea and you see a ...’) with spoken nouns (e.g., ‘dolphin’, ‘palm tree’). The words were presented consecutively in an ascending or descending direction, starting from the center of the screen. These physical spatial cues did not influence lexical choices. However, the produced nouns met the spatial characteristics of the broader sentence contexts such that the typical spatial locations of the produced noun referents were predicted by the location of the situations described by the sentence fragments (i.e., upper or lower sphere). By including distributional semantic similarity measures derived from computing cosine values between sentence nouns and produced nouns using a web-based text corpus, we show that the meaning dimension of ‘location in space’ guides lexical selection during speaking. We discuss the relation of this spatial meaning dimension to accounts of experientially grounded and usage-based theories of language processing and their combination in hybrid approaches. In doing so, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the many facets of meaning processing during language production and their impact on the words we select to express verbal messages.

No abstract

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.