Syllabic pseudohomophone priming in tip-of-the-tongue states resolution: The role of syllabic position and number of syllables

The influence of induced moods on aging of phonological encoding in spoken word production: an ERP study

This study investigated the influence of induced mood on the phonological encoding involved in Chinese spoken word production with a picture-word inference task while concurrently recorded electrophysiological signals. In the experiment, young and older participants watched videos for inducing positive, negative, or neutral mood, and then they were instructed to name target picture while ignoring phonologically related or unrelated distractor words. A phonological facilitation effect was observed in young adults but not in older adults, suggesting an age-related decline of phonological encoding. Both groups showed an inhibition effect in negative mood but not in positive mood, suggesting that speakers have different processing styles in different moods. ERP data revealed a phonological effect around the time window of 250-350 ms in both groups. Meanwhile, young adults showed a phonological effect around 350-450 ms in negative mood and positive mood which may reflect self-monitoring in speech production. We suggest that the former effect may reflect phonological encoding while the latter reflects self-monitoring of internal syllables or phonemes. Furthermore, induced moods influence the phonological effect in older and young adults differently. Behavioral and ERP results provide consistent evidence for the aging decline of phonological encoding in spoken word production.

Effects of age on the time course of syntactic priming in Chinese sentence production: an ERP study

Using a syntactic priming task, we investigated the time course of syntactic encoding in Chinese sentence production and compared encoding patterns between younger and older adults. Participants alternately read sentence descriptions and overtly described pictures, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We manipulated the abstract prime structure (active or passive) as well as the lexical overlap of the prime and the target (verb overlap or no overlap). The syntactic choice results replicated classical abstract priming and lexical boost effects in both younger and older adults. However, when production latency was taken into account, the speed benefit from syntactic repetition differed between the two age groups. Meanwhile, preferred priming facilitated production in both age groups, whereas nonpreferred priming inhibited production in the older group. For electroencephalography, an earlier effect of syntactic repetition and a later effect of lexical overlap showed a two-stage pattern of syntactic encoding. Older adults also showed a more delayed and interactive encoding pattern than younger adults, indicating a greater reliance on lexical information. These results are illustrative of the two-stage competition and residual activation models.

Aging Effects on Phonological and Semantic Priming in the Tip-of-the-Tongue: Evidence From a Two-Step Approach

The mechanism underlying the age difference in spoken word production remains controversial. We used a two-step approach proposed by Gollan and Brown (2006) to investigate the semantic and phonological retrieval deficits when tip-of-the-tongue occurs in young and older adults. Importantly, we controlled the inhibition ability in both older and young groups. In experiment 1 with a people pictures naming task, older adults produced more TOTs than young adults, and they suffered from phonological retrieval deficit rather than semantic retrieval deficit in speaking. In experiment 2 with a priming paradigm, participants were presented semantically related or phonologically related names before target pictures, which formed semantic or phonological priming conditions for lexical access. Compared with young adults, older adults showed a greater effect of phonological priming on decreasing TOTs occurrence. For semantic retrieval deficit, older adults exhibited a smaller phonological facilitation effect and a larger semantic interference effect than young adults. For phonological retrieval deficit, older adults presented a larger phonological facilitation effect in the first-name related priming condition than the first-syllable related priming condition, whereas young adults showed similar facilitation effects between the two phonological priming conditions. Our findings provide consistent evidence for the transmission deficit hypothesis, and highlight that aging affects bidirectional connections between semantic and phonological nodes in speech production.

Phonological Interlopers Tend to Repeat When Tip-of-the-Tongue States Repeat

We elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states to replicate the finding that TOTs repeat for individual words. Humphreys and colleagues have attributed this error repetition phenomenon to implicit learning of the mappings between the lemma and phonology. We also examined whether or not interlopers - repeated information that persistently comes to mind - repeat during TOT states for individual words, along with the type of interlopers. Participants were given a TOT test and the same TOT test one week later. The test consisted of the presentation of a definition and participants indicated if they knew the word, did not know the word, or if they were in a TOT state. Participants were also given 15 s to think aloud about the target word on both test and retest. We found that information repeats significantly more often for repeated TOT states (26%) than repeated Don't Know states (13%). We also found that participants experienced significantly more repeated phonological interlopers during a repeated TOT state (59%) versus a repeated Don't Know state (12%). Theoretically, the results may suggest that the TOT state is best described as a subthreshold state, and that within this subthreshold state there is a specific erroneous pattern of activation (akin to a local minimum) rather than a non-specific pattern of activation. These findings are an important constraint toward the development of a more formal explanation of recurring TOTs.

Portuguese Norms of Name Agreement, Concept Familiarity, Subjective Frequency and Visual Complexity for 150 Colored and Tridimensional Pictures

Pictures are complex stimuli that require a careful control of several characteristics and attributes standardized for different languages. In this work we present for the first time European Portuguese (EP) norms for name agreement, concept familiarity, subjective frequency and visual complexity for a new set of 150 colored pictures. These pictures were selected to represent exemplars of the most used semantic categories in research and to depict objects which, though familiar to the participants, were rarely used in daily life, which makes them particularly prone to speech failures such as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Norms were collected from 640 EP native speakers that rated each picture in the four variables through a web-survey procedure. Results showed, as expected, that a large number of pictures in the dataset elicited a TOT response, and additionally that the ratings obtained in each of the dimensions are in line with those observed in other pictorial datasets. Norms can be freely downloaded at https://www.psi.uminho.pt/en/Research/Psycholinguistics/Pages/Databases.aspx.