Electrophysiological estimates of the time course of semantic and phonological encoding during listening and naming

Abstract

Current psycholinguistic models suggest that we know what we want to say before we decide how we are going to say it: in other words, for speaking, word meaning is activated prior to information about syntax and phonology. Listening likely involves the reverse order of processes: phonological processing before meaning activation. We examined the relative time courses of phonological and semantic processing during language production and comprehension using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants viewed a series of pictures (with the instruction to covertly name the depicted item), or heard a series of words, and made dual choice Go/noGo decisions based on each item's conceptual (whether the item was an animal or an object) and phonological features (whether the item's German name started with a vowel or a consonant). During picture naming, the N200 component (related to response inhibition) indicated that conceptual processing preceded phonological processing by about 170 ms. During auditory word processing, on the other hand, the brain activity related to these two aspects of comprehension indicated some temporal overlap with the N200 to phonological processing preceding that to semantic processing by only about 85 ms. In sum, the data are compatible with current psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension and argue for serial or widely spaced cascaded processing during production but more parallel processing of information during comprehension.

Event-related brain potentials and cognitive processes related to perceptual—motor information transmission

“…The experimental designs of two psycholinguistic ERP studies (Rodríguez-Fornells, Schmitt, Kutas, & Münte, 2002;Schmitt, Schiltz, Zaake, Kutas, & Münte, 2001) also closely paralleled the present experiment. Schmitt et al used the same logic as in the present study, and then used the latency of the peak of the N2 to ask which of two dimensions (semantic, syntactic) was resolved first.…”

“…Schmitt et al used the same logic as in the present study, and then used the latency of the peak of the N2 to ask which of two dimensions (semantic, syntactic) was resolved first. In the other study (Rodríguez-Fornells et al, 2002), semantic and phonologic dimensions were examined. The latencies of the N2 peaks reversed, depending on the modality of the stimulation (visual, auditory)-a manipulation that apparently reversed which dimension was accessed more quickly.…”

Comparing Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Production in Immediate and Delayed Naming Through the Analysis of Word Age of Acquisition Effects

“…For instance, metalinguistic tasks associated to go/no go paradigms have been largely used since the first ERP studies on speech production with healthy subjects (Jescheniak, Schriefers, Garrett, & Friederici, 2002;Rodriguez-Fornells, Schmitt, Kutas, & Münte, 2002;Schmitt, Münte, & Kutas, 2000;Van Turennout, Hagoort, & Brown, 1998, 1999Zhang & Damian, 2009) and with brain damaged (aphasic) speakers Hensel, Rockstroch, Berg, & Schonle, 2004). Besides the drawback of using a metalinguistic task to study speech production, the interpretation of such results in terms of time-course of the addressed encoding processes is problematic.…”

Pseudohomophone effects provide evidence of early lexico‐phonological processing in visual word recognition

“…Phonological effects in visual word recognition were found in a number of tasks, such as backward masking (Perfetti and Bell, 1991), naming (Mechelli et Early Phonological Activation in Visual Word Recognition al., 2007;Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002), lexical decision (Pexman and Lupker, 2001;Ziegler et al, 2001), sentence reading (Newman and Connolly, 2004), letter search (Ziegler and Jacobs, 1995;Ziegler et al, 1997) and also semantic categorization (Van Orden, 1987).…”