Does facilitation by phonological cuing in picture naming depend on the modality of the cue?

Abstract

ABSTRACTBackground: Phonological cuing in spoken picture naming is widely used to improve word production accuracy in aphasic participants and to investigate word planning processes in psycholinguistic experiments with healthy participants. However, different paradigms and different modalities have been used across studies and populations, with some contradictory results.Aims: Here, we investigate whether and how the modality in which a phonological cue is delivered impacts on word production in picture naming tasks using the exact same paradigm with healthy and with aphasic participants.Methods & Procedure: In experiment 1, behavioural and electroencephalographic event-related potential (ERP) responses to auditory, visual and audiovisual cues in a picture naming task were investigated in healthy participants. In experiment 2, the impact of the same cue modalities was studied on errors and latencies in 15 aphasic participants.Outcomes & Results: The modality in which the cue is delivered influenced phonological facilitation effects in both populations, the audio modality being the most facilitative on production latencies in healthy participants and in participants with mild aphasia. No further gains were obtained by a double modality audiovisual cue on production latencies, whereas the double cues interfered with production accuracy in aphasic participants. ERP results not only were compatible with facilitation of phonological encoding in all experimental conditions but also showed modulation of a late encoding time period for both the visual and audiovisual cues, likely reflecting interference of the visual modality during monitoring or motor speech encoding. The latter observation is indeed coherent with the interference of the audiovisual modality that was observed on error rates in the more severely impaired aphasic participants.Conclusions: These results suggest that unimodal auditory cuing is the facilitatory condition, while visual cues in unimodal or bimodal conditions give rise to both facilitation and interference which manifest behaviourally depending on the balance of these opposing effects.