Speaking words: Contributions of cognitive neuropsychological research

Abstract

We review the significant cognitive neuropsychological contributions to our understanding of spoken word production that were made during the period of 1984 to 2004–since the founding of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology. We then go on to identify and discuss a set of outstanding questions and challenges that face future cognitive neuropsychological researchers in this domain. We conclude that the last 20 years have been a testament to the vitality and productiveness of this approach in the domain of spoken word production and that it is essential that we continue to strive for the broader integration of cognitive neuropsychological evidence into cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience.

Acknowledgments

The first author gratefully acknowledges the support of NIH grant DC006740 for the writing of this paper.

Notes

Furthermore, the pattern reported in Table 3 was also observed for the subset of items for which grammatical gender cannot be predicted by the final segment of the word (i.e., nouns ending in/o/that are feminine and nouns ending in/a/that are masculine; nouns ending in/e/,/i/, and/u/that can be either masculine or feminine).

Note, this was also the case even for nonwords—“this is a wug; these are ___” was less difficult than “these people wug, this person ___.” The reverse pattern was exhibited by JR (Shapiro & Caramazza, 2003b).

As discussed above, Levelt and colleagues' position with regard to lexical representation is that there are two levels of lexical representation-lemmas and lexemes, prior to the phoneme level. They assume that only a single selected lemma will activate its corresponding lexeme, and only this lexeme can pass on activation to the phoneme level. Despite this additional level/stage, it is not obvious that this changes any of the predictions we will discuss here.

For example, the probabilities need to take into account the numbers of neighbours of the various types (see Rapp & Goldrick, 2000, for further discussion).

This conclusion is assumed to hold across a range of simulation implementations, e.g., whether the representations in the system are localist or distributed or whether the system is implemented as an attractor network or in some other class of activation spreading architecture.