Central bottleneck influences on the processing stages of word production.

Abstract

Does producing a word slow performance of a concurrent, unrelated task?In two experiments, 108 subjects named pictures and discriminated tones.In Experiment 1, pictures were named after cloze sentences; the durations of the word-production stages of lemma-and phonological word-formselection were manipulated with high-and low-constraint cloze sentences and high-and lowfrequency-name pictures respectively.In Experiment 2, pictures were presented with simultaneous distractor words; the durations of lemma-and phoneme-selection were manipulated with conceptually and phonologically related distractors.All manipulations except the phoneme-selection manipulation delayed tone-discrimination responses as much as picture-naming responses.These results suggest that early word-production stages -lemma-and phonological word-form-selectionare subject to a central processing bottleneck, while the later stage -phoneme selection -is not. Central Bottleneck Influences on the Processing Stages of Word ProductionA fundamental issue in psychology concerns how easily we can do more than one thing at the same time.Not only is this issue of practical significance (e.g., is it scientifically justifiable to prohibit talking on cellular phones while driving?), but it is also of scientific interest.Specifically, to the extent that a task can be performed without hindering other simultaneously performed tasks, it implies that it is carried out by separate, dedicated processing mechanisms.In contrast, if performance of one task interferes with performance of another, it implies that at least some components of that task are carried out by shared processing mechanisms.