Work

Central bottleneck influences on the processing stages of word production.

Year: 2002

Type: article

Abstract: Does producing a word slow performance of a concurrent, unrelated task? In 2 experiments, 108 participants named pictures and discriminated tones. In Experiment 1, pictures were named after cloze sentences; the durations of the word-production stages of lemma and phonological word-form selection were manipulated with high- and low-constraint cloze sentences and high- and low-frequency-name pictures, respectively. In Experiment 2, pictures were presented with simultaneous distractor words; the durations of lemma and phoneme selection were manipulated with conceptually and phonologically related distractors. All manipulations, except the phoneme-selection manipulation, delayed tone-discrimination responses as much as picture-naming responses. These results suggest that early word-production stages--lemma and phonological word-form selection--are subject to a central processing bottleneck, whereas the later stage--phoneme selection--is not.

Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

DOI: 10.1037//0278-7393.28.6.1187

Authors: Victor S. Ferreira, Harold Pashler

Institution: University of California San Diego

Language: English

Topic: Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute of Mental Health

Awards: G132058544, Syntactic flexibility in language production, G4105284314, Perceptual &Cognitive Components of Attention