Tracking Lexical Access in Speech Production: Electrophysiological Correlates of Word Frequency and Cognate Effects

Abstract

The present study establishes an electrophysiological index of lexical access in speech production by exploring the locus of the frequency and cognate effects during overt naming. We conducted 2 event-related potential (ERP) studies with 16 Spanish-Catalan bilinguals performing a picture naming task in Spanish (L1) and 16 Catalan-Spanish bilinguals performing a picture naming task in Spanish (L2). Behavioral results showed a clear frequency effect and an interaction between frequency and cognate status. The ERP elicited during the production of high-frequency words diverged from the low-frequency ERP between 150 and 200 ms post-target presentation and kept diverging until voice onset. The same results were obtained when comparing cognate and noncognate conditions. Positive correlations were observed between naming latencies and mean amplitude of the P2 component following the divergence, for both the lexical frequency and the cognate effects. We conclude that lexical access during picture naming begins approximately 180 ms after picture presentation. Furthermore, these results offer direct electrophysiological evidence for an early influence of frequency and cognate status in speech production. The theoretical implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.

The second language interferes with picture naming in the first language: evidence for L2 activation during L1 production

“…faster naming latencies in the production of cognates as opposed to non-cognates) in picture naming which was substantially smaller in L1 naming than in L2 naming (cf. Strijkers, Costa, & Thierry, 2010, who obtained comparable behavioural and electrophysiological effects in L1 and L2 cognate naming). However, cognates constitute a very specific subset of lexical entries in the bilingual case and only capture parts of the issues related to crosslanguage co-activation, in that they are by definition target-related (i.e.…”

Sound-sized segments are significant for Mandarin speakers

“…The interval of 200-400 ms that hosts ERP effects in our study is in agreement with an estimated time course of phonological encoding and internal monitoring by Indefrey and Levelt (39) and with previous ERP studies on overt production. For instance, Strijkers et al (37) observed that manipulation of lexical frequency of objects in a picture-naming task, commonly assumed to reside at the phonological form level, yielded ERP differences ∼180 ms after picture presentation. Eulitz et al (33) explored the time course of phonological encoding by comparing overt picture naming with passive viewing of the same pictures and found differential ERPs in the 275-to 400-ms interval.…”

Dynamics of phonological–phonetic encoding in word production: Evidence from diverging ERPs between stroke patients and controls

“…lexical-phonological processes). These recent ERP studies investigated overt speech production via semantic interference paradigms (Aristei et al, 2011;Costa et al, 2009;Maess et al, 2009), the manipulation of psycholinguistic variables supposed to affect specific encoding stages such as lexical frequency (Strijkers et al, 2010) and word age of acquisition (Laganaro & Perret, 2011), or compared behavioural tasks entailing different encoding processes (Vihla et al, 2006). Commonly, these studies have reported that lexical selection is engaged ~200ms after picture presentation, while lexical-phonological encoding processes take place ~260-300ms after picture onset.…”