Abstract
A striking puzzle about language use in everyday conversation is that turn-taking latencies are usually very short, whereas planning language production takes much longer. This implies overlap between language comprehension and production processes, but the nature and extent of such overlap has never been studied directly. Combining an interactive quiz paradigm with EEG measurements in an innovative way, we show that production planning processes start as soon as possible, that is, within half a second after the answer to a question can be retrieved (up to several seconds before the end of the question). Localization of ERP data shows early activation even of brain areas related to late stages of production planning (e.g., syllabification). Finally, oscillation results suggest an attention switch from comprehension to production around the same time frame. This perspective from interactive language use throws new light on the performance characteristics that language competence involves.
Highlights
Paradigm in the form of a quiz game
A linear mixed-effects model with response time as the dependent variable, condition (EARLY, LATE) as the main predictor, and random intercepts for participant and item, showed that responses relative to question offset in the EARLY condition (M = 640 ms, mode around 400 ms) were faster than in the LATE condition (M = 950 ms; mode around 750 ms; intercept: β = 312; LATE: β = 328; t = 17.31, p < . 0001; see Supplementary Fig. 1)
We first found a small negative effect (109– 522 ms; p = . 01) in TL2 only. This effect was larger and appeared at both time-locking points in the control experiment (TL1, EARLY vs. LATE: 246–980 ms; p = .007; TL2, LATE vs. EARLY: 72–1007 ms; p < . 001). We interpret this as an N400 effect[10] plausibly related to the predictability of the words
Summary
Paradigm in the form of a quiz game (see Methods). This preserved the essential turn-taking structure, and is a familiar genre of interactive language use. This difference in response times between the two conditions suggests that participants did some part of production planning in overlap with comprehension for EARLY questions, but gives no information about when exactly planning began. In which participants did not answer the questions, positivities were present as well
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