Planning sentences while doing other things at the same time: effects of concurrent verbal and visuospatial working memory load.

Jana Klaus,Andreas Mädebach,Jörg D Jescheniak,Frank Oppermann

doi:10.1080/17470218.2016.1167926

Jana Klaus, Andreas Mädebach + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1167926

Copy DOI

Abstract

This study investigated to what extent advance planning during sentence production is affected by a concurrent cognitive load. In two picture-word interference experiments in which participants produced subject-verb-object sentences while ignoring auditory distractor words, we assessed advance planning at a phonological (lexeme) and at an abstract-lexical (lemma) level under visuospatial or verbal working memory (WM) load. At the phonological level, subject and object nouns were found to be activated before speech onset with concurrent visuospatial WM load, but only subject nouns were found to be activated with concurrent verbal WM load, indicating a reduced planning scope as a function of type of WM load (Experiment 1). By contrast, at the abstract-lexical level, subject and object nouns were found to be activated regardless of type of concurrent load (Experiment 2). In both experiments, sentence planning had a more detrimental effect on concurrent verbal WM task performance than on concurrent visuospatial WM task performance. Overall, our results suggest that advance planning at the phonological level is more affected by a concurrently performed verbal WM task than advance planning at the abstract-lexical level. Also, they indicate an overlap of resources allocated to phonological planning in speech production and verbal WM.

Highlights

This study investigated to what extent advance planning during sentence production is affected by a concurrent cognitive load
Before we turn to the experiments, we review previous studies that looked at advance planning, both with and without a concurrent cognitive load
We explored whether advance planning both at the phonological and at the abstract–lexical level varies as a function of specific kinds of concurrent working memory (WM) load

Summary

Introduction

This study investigated to what extent advance planning during sentence production is affected by a concurrent cognitive load. We investigated (a) whether the scope of advance sentence planning at different processing levels is affected by a concurrently performed working memory (WM) task and, if so, (b) whether it is affected in a differential way, depending on the nature of that concurrent task (verbal vs visuospatial). The answer to these questions will inform us about both the degree of flexibility in speech planning at different processing levels and the kinds of resources recruited at these processing levels. Before we turn to the experiments, we review previous studies that looked at advance planning, both with and without a concurrent cognitive load

Objectives

Methods

Results