Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs

The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, whi...

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Main Authors: Zhao, Li-Ming, Yang, Yu-Fang
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2016
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701458/
id pubmed-4701458
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-47014582016-01-15 Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs Zhao, Li-Ming Yang, Yu-Fang Research Article The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, which refers to the widely observed effects that participants take longer to say aloud the names of items in pictures when the pictures in a block of trials in an experiment depict items that belong to the same semantic category than different categories. As this effect is often interpreted as a reflection of difficulty in lexical selection, the current study took the semantic blocking effect and its associated pattern of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a proxy to test whether lexical planning during sentence production extends beyond the first noun when a subject noun-phrase includes two nouns, such as “The chair and the boat are both red” and “The chair above the boat is red”. The results showed a semantic blocking effect both in onset latencies and in ERPs during the utterance of the first noun of these complex noun-phrases but not for the second noun. The indication, therefore, is that the lexical planning scope does not encompass this second noun-phrase. Indeed, the present findings are in line with accounts that propose radically incremental lexical planning, in which speakers plan ahead only one word at a time. This study also provides a highly novel example of using ERPs to examine the production of long utterances, and it is hoped the present demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach inspires further application of ERP techniques in this area of research. Public Library of Science 2016-01-05 /pmc/articles/PMC4701458/ /pubmed/26730731 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146359 Text en © 2016 Zhao, Yang http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Zhao, Li-Ming
Yang, Yu-Fang
spellingShingle Zhao, Li-Ming
Yang, Yu-Fang
Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
author_facet Zhao, Li-Ming
Yang, Yu-Fang
author_sort Zhao, Li-Ming
title Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
title_short Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
title_full Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
title_fullStr Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
title_full_unstemmed Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs
title_sort lexical planning in sentence production is highly incremental: evidence from erps
description The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, which refers to the widely observed effects that participants take longer to say aloud the names of items in pictures when the pictures in a block of trials in an experiment depict items that belong to the same semantic category than different categories. As this effect is often interpreted as a reflection of difficulty in lexical selection, the current study took the semantic blocking effect and its associated pattern of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a proxy to test whether lexical planning during sentence production extends beyond the first noun when a subject noun-phrase includes two nouns, such as “The chair and the boat are both red” and “The chair above the boat is red”. The results showed a semantic blocking effect both in onset latencies and in ERPs during the utterance of the first noun of these complex noun-phrases but not for the second noun. The indication, therefore, is that the lexical planning scope does not encompass this second noun-phrase. Indeed, the present findings are in line with accounts that propose radically incremental lexical planning, in which speakers plan ahead only one word at a time. This study also provides a highly novel example of using ERPs to examine the production of long utterances, and it is hoped the present demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach inspires further application of ERP techniques in this area of research.
publisher Public Library of Science
publishDate 2016
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701458/
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