BackgroundInterventions for aphasia should benefit from greater understanding of the temporal activation processes that support access to linguistic representations of words. The interactive activation (IA) model of word retrieval postulates two temporal components of lexical activation, transmission and maintenance, that mediate access to words. Temporal processing impairments of word retrieval are revealed when a response delay is added to a naming task: slowed transmission leads to greater accuracy and fewer nonword errors after a delay while poor maintenance leads to decreased accuracy and more nonword errors after a delay.AimsWe investigated whether a modified version of the IA model, the Semantic-Phonological (SP) model, captures changes in naming accuracy and error responses under 1-second and 5-second response delay conditions before and after a naming training protocol.MethodsTwo participants, BD82 and DS68, were administered the laboratory-developed Maintenance-Transmission Naming Test at 1-second and 5-second delays before and after naming training. We evaluated changes in naming patterns and computational fits at the two response delays before and after training, seeking a logical relationship between the two (e.g. stronger phonological transmission leads to fewer phonological errors).OutcomesBD82's naming reflected slowed transmission of lexical activation: increased accuracy and fewer nonword errors after a 5-second delay. DS68's pattern reflected a mixed pattern with moderately slowed activation transmission, but a more severe difficulty maintaining lexical activation: more accurate after a 1-second delay and more nonword errors after a 5-second delay. The pre-training data were successfully fit to the SP model. Post-training, BD82's naming accuracy did not change significantly, but she produced fewer nonword errors, especially in the 1-second response delay condition (more challenging for her). The post-training model's fit to the data was achieved by increasing phonological transmission strength, which is consistent with a reduced rate of nonword errors. For DS68, improvements were observed in the 1-second and 5-second delay conditions after training including increased accuracy and reduced rates of nonword errors. The post-training model's fit was achieved by decreasing the decay rate, which improves maintenance of both semantic and phonological activation.ConclusionsCombining computational data from an IA model of word processing and behavioral data from a picture naming task reveals the role of temporal processes of lexical activation on word retrieval. This knowledge will contribute to the development of more precise diagnostic and treatment approaches for word retrieval disorders in aphasia.

An experiment investigated the "good-enough" processing account regarding how people parse sentences with late-closure ambiguity, such as While Anna dressed the baby who was cute and cuddly spit up on the bed. One possible result of an initial misparse of the sentence (thinking that Anna dressed the baby) is that the correct parse then cannot be created. The alternative is that, although the misparse may linger in the comprehender's mind, the correct parse is eventually established and coexists with the misparse. This study approached this issue through an analogy to quantum physics. When photons are directed toward two small slits, it appears as if each photon passes through both slits ("bothness"). If particles not subject to quantum effects are directed at the slits, they pass through one or the other ("oneness"). Participants read sentences containing the late-closure ambiguity and afterward answered two questions about each sentence. These could query the potential misparse (Did Anna dress the baby?), correct-parse (Did Anna dress herself?), or the main clause (Did the baby spit up on the bed?), and the order of the question types was varied to test for quantum measurement context effects. The results supported "oneness," that is, the correct-parse and misparse of the subordinate clause do not coexist. Participants rarely said "yes" to both the misparse and correct-parse questions, and the "yes" response proportions for these two questions invariably added up to around 1.0. Furthermore, no quantum-like measurement-order effect between misparse and correct-parse questions was found.

The present study examined spontaneous detection and repair of naming errors in people with aphasia to advance a theoretical understanding of how monitoring impacts learning in lexical access. Prior work in aphasia has found that spontaneous repair, but not mere detection without repair, of semantic naming errors leads to improved naming on those same items in the future when other factors are accounted for. The present study sought to replicate this finding in a new, larger sample of participants and to examine the critical role of self-generated repair in this monitoring learning effect. Twenty-four participants with chronic aphasia with naming impairment provided naming responses to a 660-item corpus of common, everyday objects at two timepoints. At the first timepoint, a randomly selected subset of trials ended in experimenter-provided corrective feedback. Each naming trial was coded for accuracy, error type, and for any monitoring behavior that occurred, specifically detection with repair (i.e., correction), detection without repair, and no detection. Focusing on semantic errors, the original monitoring learning effect was replicated, with enhanced accuracy at a future timepoint when the first trial with that item involved detection with repair, compared to error trials that were not detected. This enhanced accuracy resulted from learning that arose from the first trial rather than the presence of repair simply signifying easier items. A second analysis compared learning from trials of self-corrected errors to that of trials ending in feedback that were detected but not self-corrected and found enhanced learning after self-generated repair. Implications for theories of lexical access and monitoring are discussed.

The language production system continually learns. The system adapts to recent experiences while also reflecting the experience accumulated over the lifetime. This article presents a theory that explains how speakers implicitly learn novel phonotactic patterns as they produce syllables. The learning is revealed in their speech errors. For example, if speakers produce syllable strings in which the consonant /f/ is always a syllable onset, their slips will obey this rule; /f/'s will then slip mostly to onset positions. The article reviews over 30 phenomena related to this finding. To explain phonotactic learning, the article presents four linked "mini-theories," each of which addresses components of the data. The first mini-theory, the production theory, provides an account of how speech errors arise during the assembly of word forms. The second, the learning theory, characterizes the implicit learning of phoneme distributions within the production system. The third mini-theory, the consolidation theory, augments the learning theory to explain instances in which this learning depends on a period of time, possibly a sleep period, before it is expressed. The final mini-theory, the developmental theory, addresses cases in which learning varies between children and adults, and depends on speakers' early linguistic experience. The resulting theory forges links between these diverse aspects of psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Predictions about likely upcoming input may promote rapid language processing, but the mechanisms by which such predictions are generated remain unclear. One hypothesis is that comprehenders use their production system to covertly produce what they would say if they were the speaker. If reading predictable words involves covert production, this act might have consequences for memory. The present study capitalized on the production effect, which is the observation that words read aloud are remembered better than words read silently. Participants read sentence-final predictable and unpredictable words aloud or silently, followed by a surprise recognition memory task. If reading predictable words involves covert production, the memory improvement from actually producing the words should be smaller for predictable words than for unpredictable words. This was confirmed in Experiment 1, which tested item memory using old/new judgments. Experiment 2 followed the same procedure, except that participants now made aloud/silent judgments probing their memory for prior acts of production. Here the hypothesis was that, relative to unpredictable words, it should be more difficult to remember whether predictable words had been read aloud or silently. Indeed, word predictability tended to make it harder to tell the difference, suggesting that predictability blurred the lines between production and comprehension. Taken together, the findings support the idea that reading predictable words can involve covert production and show that this act has consequences for what readers retain.

We propose that deficits in lexical retrieval can involve difficulty in transmission of activation between processing levels, or difficulty in maintaining activation. In support, we present an investigation of picture naming by persons with aphasia in which the naming response is generated after a 1 s (sec) cue to respond in one condition or a 5 s cue to respond in another. Some individuals did better after 5 s, some did worse after 5 s, and some were not impacted by the delay. It is suggested that better performance after 5 s indicates a transmission deficit and that worse performance after 5 s indicates a maintenance deficit. To support this hypothesis, we adapted the two-step semantic-phonological model of lexical retrieval (Schwartz et al., 2006) so that it can simulate the passage of time and can simulate lesions in transmission (its semantic and phonological connection strength parameters) and/or maintenance (its decay parameter). The naming error patterns after 1 and 5 s for each participant were successfully fit to the model. Persons who did better after 5 s were found to have low connection strength parameters, persons who did worse after 5 s were simulated with an increased decay rate, and persons whose performance did not differ with delay were found to have lesions of both types. Some potential theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Every language has unique phonotactics, general rules about how phonemes combine to make syllables. We know that people can implicitly learn new phonotactic rules in the laboratory, and these rules then affect their speech errors. Some types of rules, however, require a consolidation period before they influence speech errors. Two experiments are reported that replicate a recent study that transferred this finding to a nonspeech domain. In this study and our replications, the production of a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable is replaced by pushing three buttons-a finger, a thumb, and another finger. These button-push studies reproduce prior findings in the speech domain about consolidation and the retention of phonotactic learning but also point to some differences, suggesting that the massive amount of experience that adults have producing syllables leads to unique effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This chapter reviews research on language production from a psycholinguistic perspective. Much recent research in this area has investigated how the production system adapts to current circumstances and to circumstances that are generally more likely. The chapter describes long-term adaptive mechanisms that arise from implicit learning within the production system and several short-term mechanisms that help the system prevent errors, promote fluency, and manage the flow of information so that listeners can easily understand what is being said.

Repetition reduces word duration. Explanations of this process have appealed to audience design, internal production mechanisms, and combinations thereof (e.g. Kahn & Arnold, 2015). Jacobs, Yiu, Watson, and Dell (2015) proposed the auditory feedback hypothesis, which states that speakers must hear a word, produced either by themselves or another speaker, in order for duration reduction on a subsequent production. We conducted a strong test of the auditory feedback hypothesis in two experiments, in which we masked auditory feedback and whispering to prevent speakers from hearing themselves fully. Both experiments showed that despite limiting the sources of normal feedback, repetition reduction was observed to equal extents in masked and unmasked conditions, suggesting that repetition reduction may be supported by multiple sources, such as somatosensory feedback and feedforward signals, depending on their availability.

Response selection is often studied by examining single responses, although most actions are performed within an overarching sequence. Understanding processes that order and execute items in a sequence is thus essential to give a complete picture of response selection. In this study, we investigate response selection by comparing single responses and response sequences as well as unimanual and bimanual sequences. We recorded EEG while participants were typing one- or two-keystroke sequences. Irrespective of stimulus modality (visual or auditory), response-locked analysis revealed distinct contralateral and ipsilateral components previously associated with activation and inhibition of alternative responses. Unimanual sequences exhibited a similar activation/inhibition pattern as single responses, but with the activation component of the pattern expressed more strongly, reflecting the fact that the hand will be used for two strokes. In contrast, bimanual sequences were associated with successive activation of each of the corresponding motor cortices controlling each keystroke and no traceable inhibitory component. In short, the activation component of the two-keystroke sequence EEG pattern can be understood from the addition of activation components of single-stroke sequences; the inhibition of the hand not being used is only evidenced when that hand is not planned for the next stroke.

The central thesis of this chapter is that data from aphasia provide a key link between behavioral studies of speech errors and neurocognitive models of language production. We describe a body of research that uses the interactive two-step model to characterize the cognitive machinery of lexical access and simulate aphasic speech error patterns in naming and repetition. The model incorporates a two-step lexical access process and a nonlexical process for accessing phonology directly from auditory input. It attributes the variety of aphasic error patterns to variation in model parameters. In a final step, we have used voxel-based lesion analysis to map the lesion correlates of error patterns and parameters in large numbers of individuals, thereby linking model processes and brain areas. This work complements and extends contemporary neurocognitive accounts of language and brain, demonstrating that aphasia research is as central to theory development today as it has been historically.

The "blueprint for the speaker" (Levelt, 1989) claimed that production is carried out by autonomous processing components. We present a framework for how those production components may change with experience and review studies that demonstrate limitations in what can be easily learned by adult speakers. Such limitations have been observed in the acquisition of new phonotactic constraints and in speakers' ability to alter particular verbs' biases for particular syntactic structures. We attribute these limitations to the learned componential structure of the production system.

Speech errors are sensitive to newly learned phonotactic constraints. For example, if speakers produce strings of syllables in which /f/ is an onset if the vowel is /æ/, but a coda if the vowel is /I/, their slips will respect that constraint after a period of sleep. Constraints in which the contextual factor is nonlinguistic, however, do not appear to be learnable by this method-for example, /f/ is an onset if the speech rate is fast, but /f/ is a coda if the speech rate is slow. The present study demonstrated that adult English speakers can learn (after a sleep period) constraints based on stress (e.g., /f/ is an onset if the syllable is stressed, but /f/ is a coda if the syllable is unstressed), but cannot learn analogous constraints based on tone (e.g., /f/ is an onset if the tone is rising, but /f/ is a coda if the tone is falling). The results are consistent with the fact that, in English, stress is a relevant lexical phonological property (e.g., "INsight" and "inCITE" are different words), but tone is not (e.g., "yes!" and "yes?" are the same word, despite their different pragmatic functions). The results provide useful constraints on how consolidation effects in learning may interact with early learning experiences.

Speakers implicitly learn novel phonotactic patterns while producing strings of syllables. The learning is revealed in their speech errors. For example, if /f/ is artificially restricted to the syllable onset position and /s/ is restricted to the coda position, speakers' slips will respect these constraints, demonstrating learning. The mechanism behind this learning was investigated by reversal shift. In two experiments, speakers produced syllable sequences for 32 trials in which one consonant was constrained to be an onset and one, a coda. Then for the next 32 trials, the constraints were reversed; for example, /f/ is now a coda and /s/ an onset. Over a third block of 32 trials, the constraints were reversed again back to the original rule. The learning of the reversed rules was slow in comparison to rapid learning of the original rule, providing evidence that the underlying mechanism is incremental. To learn a reversed rule, first one must unlearn the original association before making progress on the new rule. This pattern of rapid initial learning and slow reversal learning was replicated in a nonspeech analogue of the syllable production task. Participants pushed sequences of buttons, in which finger presses corresponded to consonants and thumb presses to vowels. A control experiment found that non-reversal shifts between blocks are easily learned, showing that the difficulty is specifically with reversal shifts. A final experiment provided evidence that learning in these experiments is greater when productions are more errorful.

Speakers implicitly learn novel phonotactic patterns by producing strings of syllables. The learning is revealed in their speech errors. First-order patterns, such as "/f/ must be a syllable onset," can be distinguished from contingent, or second-order, patterns, such as "/f/ must be an onset if the vowel is /a/, but a coda if the vowel is /o/." A metaanalysis of 19 experiments clearly demonstrated that first-order patterns affect speech errors to a very great extent in a single experimental session, but second-order vowel-contingent patterns only affect errors on the second day of testing, suggesting the need for a consolidation period. Two experiments tested an analogue to these studies involving sequences of button pushes, with fingers as "consonants" and thumbs as "vowels." The button-push errors revealed two of the key speech-error findings: first-order patterns are learned quickly, but second-order thumb-contingent patterns are only strongly revealed in the errors on the second day of testing. The influence of computational complexity on the implicit learning of phonotactic patterns in speech production may be a general feature of sequence production.