Mental representations of partner task cause interference in picture naming

Abstract

Interference in picture naming occurs from representing a partner's preparations to speak (Gambi, van de Cavey, & Pickering, 2015). We tested the origins of this interference using a simple non-communicative joint naming task based on Gambi et al. (2015), where response latencies indexed interference from partner task and partner speech content, and eye fixations to partner objects indexed overt attention. Experiment 1 contrasted a partnerpresent condition with a control partner-absent condition to establish the role of the partner in eliciting interference. For latencies, we observed interference from the partner's task and speech content, with interference increasing due to partner task in the partner-present condition. Eye-tracking measures showed that interference in naming was not due to overt attention to partner stimuli but to broad expectations about likely utterances. Experiment 2 examined whether an equivalent non-verbal task also elicited interference, as predicted from a language as joint action framework. We replicated the finding of interference due to partner task and again found no relationship between overt attention and interference. These results support Gambi et al. (2015). Individuals co-represent a partner's task while speaking, and doing so does not require overt attention to partner stimuli.

Representation of others’ synchronous and asynchronous sentences interferes with sentence production

“…Interestingly, participants tended to look more often at their partner's picture when they knew they were naming rather than categorizing, and also when the partner's picture was different to their own, but overall there were very few looks to partner's pictures, suggesting that speakers did not regularly engage in detailed representation of their partner's utterances. In sum, the findings of Gambi et al (2015) and Brehm et al (2019) are consistent with other work (Baus et al, 2014;Demiral et al, 2016;Kuhlen & Abdel Rahman, 2017;Hoedemaker et al, 2017) in showing that speakers represent their partners' act of production in a similar way to how they represent their own act of production. However, they also suggest that the content of others' utterances (i.e., what they are saying) may not be represented: there was only inconsistent evidence of increased interference when producing a different utterance from one's partner, compared to producing the same utterance.…”

“…However, the effect was not significant (t = -1.12) when we instead discarded these data points (1.14%), suggesting that the effect may have been driven by a subset of very long durations. In support of this, when we ran a Bayesian ex-Gaussian distributional analysis (Bürkner, 2016), we found a small effect of Form on the mean of The nature of the representations speakers formed of their partner's imagined utterances was also similar in this task to simpler production tasks (Gambi et al, 2015;Brehm et al, 2019): There was no evidence that speakers took longer to begin their utterances when they believed their partner was preparing to produce an utterance in a different, compared to the same, voice. However, when we analysed utterance durations, we unexpectedly found that speakers spent more time producing their utterances when the partner produced a different utterance than when they produced the same utterance.…”

“…Similarly, we think it is unlikely that utterance durations are affected differently from speech onset latencies by corepresentation. Although the clearest evidence for detailed co-representation came from utterance durations in Experiment 1, the other two experiments did not replicate this finding and the most likely conclusion based on these data and the rest of the literature (Gambi et al, 2015;Brehm et al, 2019) is that speakers do not engage in detailed co-representation of others' utterances while they prepare to speak themselves.…”

Joint language production: an electrophysiological investigation of simulated lexical access on behalf of task partner

“…If speakers had represented the second speaker’s action to the degree that they pursued lexical access, the authors reasoned, naming should have slowed down when speakers believed partners to be naming different pictures compared to naming the same pictures. These conclusions were corroborated by a recent study (Brehm, Taschenberger, & Meyer, 2019), which applied a similar task setting. In this study participants’ naming latencies were also affected by the partner’s task (yet, interestingly, in the opposite direction found in Gambi et al, 2015).…”

“…However, there is a growing number of studies employing joint picture naming tasks that also report only limited, or no, representation of the partner's naming response (Brehm et al, 2019;Gambi, Van de Cavey, & Pickering, 2015;Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019). These studies come to the conclusion that speakers may represent their partner's naming response, but not necessarily to the degree that they seek lexical access for the pictures the partner names.…”