Lexical‐semantic retention and speech production:further evidence from normal and brain‐damaged participants for a phrasal scope of planning

Abstract

The present study investigated the scope of planning in speech production by examining onset latencies for sentences describing moving picture displays. The experimental sentences began with either a simple or complex noun phrase, but were matched in length and content words. Results from young and old normal participants replicated previous findings of Smith and Wheeldon (1999) in showing longer onset latencies for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, supporting a phrasal scope of planning. Two aphasic patients were tested who, in previous studies, had shown a short-term memory deficit either in semantic retention (patient ML)or in phonological retention (patient EA). Patient ML showed a markedly greater disadvantage for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase whereas EAshowed an effect within normal range. The present results from the patients, together with those from previous studies, indicate that the phrasal planning is occurring at a lexical-semantic level using a capacity that is also involved in comprehension.

Verbal working memory predicts co-speech gesture: Evidence from individual differences

“…The scope of advance grammatical planning in production seems to be dependent on VWM (Martin, Miller, & Vu, 2004), word order choices are affected by VWM load (Slevc, 2011), some types of grammatical speech errors are more likely when VWM is taxed (Hartsuiker & Barkhuysen, 2006), and impairments in verbal short term memory are associated with production deficits (e.g., Martin & Freedman, 2001). Many existing accounts of gesture production claim that gesture and speech planning are carried out by shared processing mechanisms (e.g., de Ruitter, 2000; McNeill, 1992), and, thus, the current findings suggest that gesture production is linked to some of the same VWM-related processing resources recruited during message formulation and grammatical planning in language production.…”

The influence of age on the time course of word preparation in multiword utterances

“…In doing so, we took advantage of findings from several studies that show a close temporal relationship between eye movements over a picture and speakers' verbal descriptions of these pictures (Griffin, 2001;Griffin & Bock, 2000;Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998;Meyer & Van der Meulen, 2000). 3 These experiments with young college age speakers typically show 3 The degree of incrementality observed in these studies differs from that argued for in other similar non-eye tracking experiments such as Smith and Wheeldon (1999) and Martin, Miller, and Vu (2004). Those studies concluded that entire subject noun phrases were encoded prior to speech onset based on faster onset latencies for sentences such as ''The A moves above the B and C'' relative to ''The A and B move above the C''.…”

Speech planning during multiple-object naming: Effects of ageing

“…However, the older speakers needed more time to plan the names, as indicated by their long gaze durations and by disfluencies before difficult names. Similarly, Martin, Miller, and Vu (2004) found no evidence for age differences in utterance planning: On the moving pictures task (Smith & Wheeldon, 1999), both young and older participants showed effects of initial phrase complexity on utterance latencies, demonstrating that the initial phrase was planned before utterance onset in both age groups.…”