Slips of the Tongue: The Facts and a Stratificational Model

Paper by Gary S. Dell and Peter A. Reic

Word predictability blurs the lines between production and comprehension : Evidence from the production effect in memory

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Faith Tan for data collection and speech onset measurements, and to Opal Harshe for data collection. JR was supported by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) grant 275-89-032. NWO played no role in the study design, the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the article for publication.Peer reviewedPostprin

Aging and the Effects of Conversation with a Passenger or a Caller on Simulated Driving Performance

A total of 96 pairs of older and younger drivers participated in a study assessing the effects of conversation on the driving performance of older and younger drivers in a simulated city environment. These effects were investigated while drivers conversed with an in-vehicle passenger or an outside-vehicle caller. All of the passengers completed three separate, counterbalanced blocks of tasks that consisted of two single-task blocks (driving only and conversing only) and one dual-task block (driving and conversing). The results showed greater variability in velocity, lane keeping and steering control under single-task than under dual-task conditions. Drivers also showed greater average velocity and greater deviation from the center of the lane under single-task than under dualtask conditions. However, when crossing an intersection, a task requiring greater attentional resources, drivers exhibited a cost due to the dual task. Our data are consistent with the literature, which suggests that a secondary task may aid in the performance of a routinized task but may also impose costs if the primary task requires significant attentional resources. Older drivers exhibited greater variability in velocity, stayed closer to the center of the lane, and waited longer to cross intersections than their younger counterparts, suggesting that they compensate for their declining perceptual and cognitive abilities through changes in driving behavior. Drivers exhibited greater variability in steering under singletask conditions when talking to an outside-vehicle caller, and older drivers showed greater variability in velocity when conversing with an outside-vehicle caller

The Effects of Speech Production and Speech Comprehension on Simulated Driving Performance

We performed two experiments comparing the effects of speechproduction and speech comprehension on simulated driving performance. In bothexperiments, participants completed a speech task and a simulated driving taskunder single- and dual-task conditions, with language materials matched forlinguistic complexity. In Experiment 1, concurrent production and comprehensionresulted in more variable velocity compared to driving alone. Experiment 2replicated these effects in a more difficult simulated driving environment, withparticipants showing larger and more variable headway times when speaking orlistening while driving than when just driving. In both experiments, concurrentproduction yielded better control of lane position relative to single-taskperformance; concurrent comprehension had little impact on control of laneposition. On all other measures, production and comprehension had very similareffects on driving. The results show, in line with previous work, that there aredetrimental consequences for driving of concurrent language use. Our findingsimply that these detrimental consequences may be roughly the same whetherdrivers are producing speech or comprehending i

Effects of Near and Distant Phonological Neighbors on Picture Naming

Abstract Many studies have examined the effects of co-activation of similar words ("neighbors") during processing, with some reporting facilitative effects and others reporting inhibitory effects. Attractor dynamics has provided a promising integrated account in which distant semantic neighbors (moderately similar words) tend to facilitate processing and near semantic neighbors (highly similar words) tend to inhibit processing. This framework was extended to phonological neighbor effects on the accuracy of word production. For aphasic patients (N=62) and speeded young controls (N=32), picture naming was more accurate for words with many distant phonological neighbors (words with matching onsets) and less accurate for words with a near phonological neighbor (homophones). In addition, the sizes of the facilitative and inhibitory effects were correlated, suggesting that the mechanisms responsible for both effects are functionally integrated. These results extend an attractor dynamics framework that predicts facilitative effects of distant neighbors and inhibitory effects of near neighbors

Temporal characteristics of semantic perseverations induced by blocked-cyclic picture naming

When unimpaired participants name pictures quickly, they produce many perseverations that bear a semantic relation to the target, especially when the pictures are blocked by category. Evidence suggests that the temporal properties of these "semantic perseverations" may differ from typical lexical perseverations in aphasia. To explore this, we studied semantic perseverations generated by participants with aphasia on a naming task with semantic blocking [Schnur, T. T., Schwartz, M. F., Brecher, A., & Hodgson, C. (2006). Semantic interference during blocked-cyclic naming: Evidence from aphasia. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 199-227]. The properties of these perseverations were investigated by analyzing how often they occurred at each lag (distance from prior occurrence) and how time (response-stimulus interval) influenced the lag function. Chance data sets were created by reshuffling stimulus-response pairs in a manner that preserved unique features of the blocking design. We found that the semantic blocking manipulation did not eliminate the expected bias for short-lag perseverations (recency bias). However, immediate (lag 1) perseverations were not invariably the most frequent, which hints at a source of inconsistency within and across studies. Importantly, there was not a reliable difference between the lag functions for perseverations generated with a 5 s, compared to 1 s, responsestimulus interval. The combination of recency bias and insensitivity to elapsed time indicates that the perseveratory impetus in a named response does not passively decay with time but rather is diminished by interference from related trials. We offer an incremental learning account of these findings