Lexical Access in Phrase and Sentence Production: Results from Picture-Word Interference Experiments

Four experiments investigated the span of advance planning for phrases and short sentences. Dutch subjects were presented with pairs of objects, which they named using noun-phrase conjunctions (e.g., the translation equivalent of ‘‘the arrow and the bag’’) or sentences (‘‘the arrow is next to the bag’’). Each display was accompanied by an auditory distractor, which was related in form or meaning to the first or second noun of the utterance or unrelated to both. For sentences and phrases, the mean speech onset time was longer when the distractor was semantically related to the first or second noun and shorter when it was phonologically related to the first noun than when it was unrelated. No phonological facilitation was found for the second noun. This suggests that before utterance onset both target lemmas and the first target form were selected. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.