Time pressure and phonological advance planning in spoken production

Abstract

Current accounts of spoken production debate the extent to which speakers plan ahead. Here, we investigated whether the scope of phonological planning is influenced by changes in time pressure constraints. The first experiment used a picture–word interference task and showed that picture naming latencies were shorter when word distractors shared the final segments with the picture name. Experiment 2 used the same paradigm but with colored pictures to elicit determiner + adjective + noun phrases. Latencies were shorter when the distractor overlapped phonologically with the picture name. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that in colored picture naming without distractors, latencies were shorter when the object noun began with the same phoneme as the color adjective. Crucially, in all experiments introduction of a response deadline accelerated latencies, but did not alter the relative magnitude of the priming effects. In sum, pressure to provide a swift response does not reduce the scope of phonological planning.