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Ahead planning in the multi-word utterance production as indexed by contextual effects
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Elizaveta Vilenchik1, Marco Sala1, Marina Laganaro1; 1University of Geneva, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Language production is a complex process, especially when we move beyond the single-word level. There is substantial research indicating that, in picture naming, congruent contextual sentences pre-picture presentation can speed up word production. It has been shown that alpha-beta power decreases are associated with conceptual and lexical retrieval in the contextual paradigm (Piai et al., 2014; 2015; Roos & Piai, 2020). However, this contextual effect has been investigated in single-word production; hence, it is unknown whether this contextual effect can also be observed beyond single word production. In particular, is production faster when there are contextual clues to a word that is not at the onset of the utterance that has to be produced? To address this issue, we studied multi-word (noun phrases) production under different contextual conditions. Prior to the electroencephalographic (EEG) study, we investigated the effects behaviourally on native speakers of French (n = 47; 37 female; age 22.7 ± 7.5 years). They had to produce a multi-word utterance consisting of a determiner, a numeral, and a noun (e.g., les deux oiseaux [the two birds]) in the picture naming task. Before each picture, there was either a sentence context of high constraint (e.g., Dans la campagne, on entend… [In the countryside, they hear…] – HC condition) or a sentence context of low constraint (e.g., Sur le dessin, on voit… [In the painting, they see…] – LC condition). Importantly, the high contextual condition allowed to predict only the noun (not the numeral). The preliminary behavioural results show that response times (RTs) are faster in the high constraint condition compared to the low constraint condition. These results suggest that even when the word that the semantic context points to is not at the utterance onset, there is still a beneficial effect of the constraining context. They also indicate ahead planning until the noun before articulation in noun phrases. Since this behavioural evidence provides grounds for the investigation of neural correlates of contextual effects in multi-word utterance planning, currently, we are carrying out the study on planning multi-word utterances with the same contextual paradigm using EEG.
Topic Areas: Language Production,