Tracing attention and the activation flow in spoken word planning using eye movements.

Abstract

The flow of activation from concepts to phonological forms within the word production system was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed distractor pictures that were semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. Eye movements and naming latencies were recorded. The distractor pictures affected the latencies of gaze shifting and vocal naming. The magnitude of the phonological effects increased linearly with latency, excluding lapses of attention as the cause of the effects. In Experiment 2, no distractor effects were obtained when both pictures were named. When pictures with superimposed distractor words were named or the words were read in Experiment 3, the words influenced the latencies of gaze shifting and picture naming, but the pictures yielded no such latency effects in word reading. The picture-word asymmetry was obtained even with equivalent reading and naming latencies. The picture-picture effects suggest that activation spreads continuously from concepts to phonological forms, whereas the picture-word asymmetry indicates that the amount of activation is limited and task dependent.

Working memory capacity and dual-task interference in picture naming

“…According to the WEAVER++ model (Levelt et al, 1999;Roelofs, 1992Roelofs, , 2003Roelofs, , 2007Roelofs, , 2008aRoelofs, , 2008bRoelofs, , 2008c, updating/monitoring ability should not only affect dual-task performance, but also the speed of picture naming per se. Word planning in this model is achieved by spreading activation through a lexical network while condition-action rules determine what is done with the activated lexical information depending on the task goal in working memory (e.g., to name a picture).…”

“…Given that the semantic effect is one of interference rather than facilitation, lexical selection has been taken to be a competitive process (e.g., Abdel Rahman & Melinger, 2009;Hantsch et al, 2005;Levelt et al, 1999;Roelofs, 1992Roelofs, , 2003Starreveld & La Heij, 1996). This account of semantic interference has been computationally implemented in a number of models of word production, including the model of Starreveld and La Heij (1996) and WEAVER++ (Levelt et al, 1999;Piai et al, 2011;Roelofs, 1992Roelofs, , 2003Roelofs, , 2007Roelofs, , 2008aRoelofs, , 2008bRoelofs, , 2008c.…”

The components of working memory updating: An experimental decomposition and individual differences.

“…McClelland, 1979;Meyer, Irwin, Osman, & Kounois, 1988;Ratcliff, 1978;Townsend & Fific, 2004). Many cognitive operations likely run in cascades (for instance, naming and speech production; Navarrete & Costa, 2005;Roelofs, 2008).…”

Semantic context effects when naming Japanese kanji, but not Chinese hànzì

“…Models of word production distinguish various processing levels in object naming including conceptualization, retrieval of syntactic features, word-form encoding, and articulation (for overviews see e.g., Caramazza, 1997;Dell, 1986;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;Roelofs, 1992Roelofs, , 2008. Some of these models are based on results obtained with both the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm (e.g.…”