Sequential processing during noun phrase production

Abstract

This study examined whether the brain operations involved during the processing of successive words in multi word noun phrase production take place sequentially or simultaneously. German speakers named pictures while ignoring a written distractor superimposed on the picture (picture-word interference paradigm) using the definite determiner and corresponding German noun. The gender congruency and the phonological congruency (i.e., overlap in first phonemes) between target and distractor were manipulated. Naming responses and EEG were recorded. The behavioural performance replicated both the phonology and the gender congruency effects (i.e., shorter naming latencies for gender congruent than incongruent and for phonologically congruent than incongruent trials). The phonological and gender manipulations also influenced the EEG data. Crucially, the two effects occurred in different time windows and over different sets of electrodes. The phonological effect was observed substantially earlier than the gender congruency effect. This finding suggests that the processing of determiners and nouns during determiner noun phrase production occurs at least partly sequentially.

Electrophysiological characterization of facilitation and interference in the picture‐word interference paradigm

“…Notably, two aspects of the results appear in contradiction with findings from previous studies. Firstly, the present study did not find robust differences between the neutral and overlapping conditions in the stimulus‐locked ERPs (see Bürki et al, , for convergent findings). By contrast, Dell'Acqua et al () found that the mean amplitude in the 250–450 ms time window after picture onset differed between phonologically related and unrelated distractors, the ERPs being more positive for the first.…”

“…Zhu et al () compared the mean amplitudes across conditions in three time windows, 0–250 ms, 250–450 ms, and 450–600 ms and found an effect in the last time window only. Bürki et al () found no effect in the stimulus‐locked ERPs and effects in the response‐locked ERPs from about 480 to 420, 390 to 350 ms, 280 ms to 260, and 165 to 130 before the onset of articulation (note that, in this study, the participants' responses included the determiner and the noun). The time course of the phonological/facilitation effect clearly awaits further confirmation.…”

“…As discussed in the Introduction, researchers agree that the phonological/orthographical facilitation effect originates during the phonological encoding process (although the exact mechanism is debated). The difference in the ERPs between distractor‐word pairs overlapping in phonemes/letters and unrelated distractor‐word pairs can therefore be used as a marker of the phonological encoding process (see Bürki et al, ; Dell'Aqua et al, 2010, for similar reasoning). The mass univariate analysis revealed significant differences between phonological/orthographical overlapping and nonoverlapping distractor‐target word pairs in the response‐locked ERPs only, between about 270–240 ms and between about 170–100 ms (end of the analyzed period) before the onset of the vocal response.…”

“…A major aim of contemporary psycholinguistic research is to understand and model the cognitive processes that speakers use to produce words. A very popular tool to investigate these processes and their time course is the picture‐word interference paradigm (e.g., Briggs & Underwood, ; Lupker, ; Rayner & Posnansky, , for early studies; see Bölte, Dohmes, & Zwitserlood, ; Bürki, Sadat, Dubarry, & Alario, ; Damian & Spalek, ; Porcaro, Medaglia, & Krott, ; Roelofs & Piai, ; Roelofs, Piai, Garrido Rodriguez, & Chwilla, , for more recent work). In this paradigm, participants are asked to name a picture and to ignore a distractor, presented either in the auditory or in the visual modality.…”

P3 event-related brain potential reflects allocation and use of central processing capacity in language production

“…Moreover, a morpho-phonological representation has to be generated and maintained, which includes retrieving the appropriate morphemes and inflecting the adjectives (e.g., grote; morphological encoding), retrieving the phonemes and syllabifying them (phonological encoding), and accessing articulatory programs for the syllables (phonetic encoding), followed by the initiation of articulation (for "het grote blauwe oor"). These conceptual and linguistic processes and their time course have been extensively investigated in previous RT experiments (e.g., Meyer, 1996;Schriefers, 1992) and more recently in electrophysiological experiments (e.g., Bürki and Laganaro, 2014;Bürki et al, 2016;Eulitz et al, 2000;Michel Lange et al, 2015;Pylkkänen et al, 2014). However, none of these earlier studies examined influences of capacity demands on the P3 (i.e., analyses of the P3 were not reported), which was central to the present experiment.…”