The unseen, the seen, and the spoken: Latent and overt priming in cyclic picture naming

Language production entails selecting words in the face of internally, and sometimes externally, driven competition that influences the long-term accessibility of both selected words and competitors. Because both endogenous and externally presented competitors usually result in semantic interference, it is often assumed that they engage the same underlying processes. We question this assumption. Specifically, we propose that latent primes may more naturally commingle with endogenous lexical activation whereas overt primes elicit strong control processes. Two experiments examined the effects of latent (masked) and overt (picture-word) priming in combination with cyclic picture naming of small sets of taxonomically or thematically related or unrelated pictures. A subsequent continuous picture naming phase was designed to assess enduring effects of service as a prime or target. Only taxonomic relations showed substantial interference in cyclic naming. Latent priming tended to increase interference for taxonomic relations, but it produced facilitation for thematic relations. In contrast, overt priming induced interference for both types of relation, indicating exertion of cognitive control. In the continuous picture naming phases, accessibility was hindered for previously presented latent primes (Experiment 1) but enhanced for previously overt primes (Experiment 2). Surprisingly, interference in cyclic naming did not carry forward to the continuous phase. These findings suggest that masked priming may be a viable intervention in the internal dynamics of lexical selection. In contrast, they also add to the body of evidence questioning the validity of using picture-word procedures to study inherent semantic interference.

The primacy of abstract syllables in Chinese word production

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that they are also activated automatically by word perception. Therefore, in contrast to Indo-European languages, syllables but not necessarily subsyllabic components such as initial consonants can be perceptually primed in production. We tested this prediction in 2 masked-priming experiments. To isolate relevant phonological activation originating in primes, we used single character masked primes whose corresponding tones and lexical meanings always differed from those of the targets' first morphemes. Related primes potentially activated the atonal first syllables or the first consonants of target words. To strongly engage production-specific processes, we used pictures as prompts for disyllabic target words. Facilitation relative to unrelated controls was observed only in the syllable sharing condition. If anything, sharing of initial consonants had a negative valence, perhaps indicative of competition among similar coactivated words or syllables. These findings corroborate the view that abstract syllables are the first selected, proximate phonological units in Chinese word production, and that phonemic segments play a subordinate role. (PsycINFO Database Record

The exception does not rule: attention constrains form preparation in word production

Form preparation in word production, the benefit of exploiting a useful common sound (such as the first phoneme) of iteratively spoken small groups of words, is notoriously fastidious, exhibiting a seemingly categorical, all-or-none character and a corresponding susceptibility to "killers" of preparation. In particular, the presence of a single exception item in a group of otherwise phonologically consistent words has been found to eliminate the benefit of knowing a majority characteristic. This has been interpreted to mean that form preparation amounts to partial production and thus provides a window on fundamental processes of phonological word encoding (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, preparation of only fully distributed properties appears to be nonoptimal and is difficult to reconcile with the sensitivity of cognitive responses to probabilities in other domains. We show here that the all-or-none characteristic of form preparation is specific to task format. Preparation for sets that included an exception item occurred in ecologically valid production tasks, picture naming (Experiment 1), and word naming (Experiment 2). Preparation failed only in the commonly used, but indirect and resource-intensive, associative cuing task (Experiment 3). We outline an account of form preparation in which anticipation of word-initial phonological fragments uses a limited-capacity, sustained attentional capability that points to rather than enacts possibilities for imminent speech.