Hearing 'Birch' Hampers Saying 'Duck'-An Event-Related Potential Study on Phonological Interference in Immediate and Delayed Word Production

摘要

When speakers name a picture (e.g., “duck”), a distractorword phonologically related to an alternative name (e.g.,“birch” related to “bird”) slows down naming responses comparedwith an unrelated distractor word. This interferenceeffect obtained with the picture–word interference task isassumed to reflect the phonological coactivation of closesemantic competitors and is critical for evaluating contemporarymodels of word production. In this study, we determinedthe ERP signature of this effect in immediate and delayed versionsof the picture–word interference task. ERPs revealed adifferential processing of related and unrelated distractors:an early (305–436 msec) and a late (537–713 msec) negativityfor related as compared with unrelated distractors. In thebehavioral data, the interference effect was only found inimmediate naming, whereas its ERP signature was also presentin delayed naming. The time window of the earlier ERP effectsuggests that the behavioral interference effect indeedemerges at a phonological processing level, whereas the functionalsignificance of the later ERP effect is as yet not clear.The finding of a robust ERP correlate of phonological coactivationmight facilitate future research on lexical processing inword production.