An investigation of the role of working memory capacity and naming speed in phonological advance planning in language production

Abstract

Producing multi-word utterances is a complex, yet relatively effortless process. Research with the picture-word interference paradigm has shown that speakers can plan all elements of such utterances up to the phonological level before initiating speech, yet magnitude and direction of this phonological priming effect (i.e. facilitative vs. inhibitory) differ between but also within studies. We investigated possible sources for variability in the phonological advance planning scope. In two experiments, participants produced bare nouns (“monkey”) and complex noun phrases (“the small red monkey”) while ignoring distractor words phonologically (un)related to the noun. For low- and high-working memory capacity speakers as well as fast and slow speakers, we found phonological facilitation effects for the bare noun, but no distractor effects for the complex noun phrases. However, looking at individual distractor effects for utterance-final elements revealed a large variability between speakers. We conclude that phonological advance planning cannot be summarised as an overall effect, but should take into account inter- and intraindividual variability.

Picture-word interference in language production studies: Exploring the roles of attention and processing times.

“…As discussed in the introduction, many studies use these effects as markers of underlying processes (e.g., phonological facilitation as a marker of phonological encoding, semantic interference as a marker of lexical access; e.g., Meyer, 1996). For instance, several authors used the phonological facilitation effect to examine the scope of phonological advanced planning and show that this effect depends on the type of utterance (e.g., bare noun naming vs. noun phrases, Klaus & Schriefers, 2018; adjective-noun vs. noun-adjective, Michel Lange & Laganaro, 2014). In light of the present study’s findings, the question arises of whether the interactions between utterance type and phonological facilitation reported in these studies reflect the scope of advanced planning or are a mere consequence of differences in the temporal alignment between target and distractor word processing across utterance types.…”

“…Interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm are regularly used as a tool to examine other issues, such as the role of cognitive resources in language production (e.g., working memory; see, e.g., Klaus et al, 2017), the scope of advanced planning (e.g., Meyer, 1996), or the role of response relevance, to cite a few. To address these issues, experimental effects are compared across conditions (e.g., with different types of concomitant tasks, e.g., Klaus et al, 2017; with different types of responses, e.g., bare nouns versus noun phrases, e.g., Klaus & Schriefers, 2018; with and without familiarization with the picture stimuli, e.g., Gauvin et al, 2018). Interactions between interference or facilitation and these conditions are used to inform the issues at stake.…”

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Individual Differences in Speech Planning

“…One of the cognitive factors that has been suggested to play a role in speech production is working memory (e.g., Hartsuiker and Barkhuysen, 2006;Kellogg et al, 2007;Wagner et al, 2010;Slevc, 2011;Klaus et al, 2017;Klaus and Schriefers, 2018;Ivanova and Ferreira, 2019), and a few studies to date have specifically examined the effect of working memory on the scope of planning.…”

Planning scope in second language sentence production: Do bilingual speakers plan ahead more in L1 than in L2?

“…However, at the phonological level, both nouns were activated within the visuospatial working memory load condition, but no object-related distractor effect was observed in the verbal working memory load condition. Thus, a reduced planning scope was only found on the phonological level as a function of the type of working memory load (for more direct evidence that planning scope is linked to working memory, see Bishop & Intlekofer, 2020;Klaus & Schriefers, 2018;Swets et al, 2014).…”