Central bottleneck influences on the processing stages of word production.
Does producing a word slow performance of a concurrent, unrelated task? In 2 experiments, 108 participants named pictures and discriminated tones. In Experiment 1, pictures were named after cloze sentences; the durations of the word-production stages of lemma and phonological word-form selection were manipulated with high- and low-constraint cloze sentences and high- and low-frequency-name pictures, respectively. In Experiment 2, pictures were presented with simultaneous distractor words; the durations of lemma and phoneme selection were manipulated with conceptually and phonologically related distractors. All manipulations, except the phoneme-selection manipulation, delayed tone-discrimination responses as much as picture-naming responses. These results suggest that early word-production stages--lemma and phonological word-form selection--are subject to a central processing bottleneck, whereas the later stage--phoneme selection--is not.
Ferreira
Victor S
VS
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0109, USA. ferreira@psy.ucsd.edu
Pashler
Harold
H
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior