How word comprehension exposures facilitate later spoken production: implications for lexical processing and repetition priming

ABSTRACT

Both comprehension and production exposures to words facilitate spoken production of the same words in picture-naming tasks performed several minutes later. Three experiments examined the mechanisms by which different types of comprehension exposures to words facilitate spoken production. Both overt and silent reading and listening tasks elicited substantial priming in picture naming at 10-minute but not 1-week retention intervals. Relative to silent conditions, encoding conditions that involved speaking the target word overtly elicited stronger priming effects in both RT and accuracy and larger frequency effects in RT. Frequency effects were not reliable in accuracy priming or silent-encoding RT priming. Articulatory suppression did not diminish priming effects relative to silent reading/listening, and priming effects did not depend on whether presentations at encoding were visual or auditory. Together, the results indicate that a common modality-general lemma representation is accessed in comprehension and production, that both lemma and phonological retrieval contribute to repetition priming in production, and that phonological retrieval is sensitive to word frequency. These results are consistent with a theory based on transfer-appropriate processing if word comprehension elicits top-down processing or feedback from the concept to the lemma.

KEYWORDS:

• Repetition priming
• word production
• word comprehension
• word frequency
• transfer-appropriate processing

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Manuel R. Meléndez Luján and Erika Guedea for their assistance with data collection for Experiments 2 and 3. Preliminary data were presented at ARMADILLO, the Southwest Cognition Conference in 2017 and at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-1632283] to the second author; Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.