A comparison of two procedures for verbal response time fractionation

To describe the mental architecture between stimulus and response, cognitive models often divide the stimulus-response (SR) interval into stages or modules. Predictions derived from such models are typically tested by focusing on the moment of response emission, through the analysis of response time (RT) distributions. To go beyond the single response event, we recently proposed a method to fractionate verbal RTs into two physiologically defined intervals that are assumed to reflect different processing stages. The analysis of the durations of these intervals can be used to study the interaction between cognitive and motor processing during speech production. Our method is inspired by studies on decision making that used manual responses, in which RTs were fractionated into a premotor time (PMT), assumed to reflect cognitive processing, and a motor time (MT), assumed to reflect motor processing. In these studies, surface EMG activity was recorded from participants' response fingers. EMG onsets, reflecting the initiation of a motor response, were used as the point of fractionation. We adapted this method to speech-production research by measuring verbal responses in combination with EMG activity from facial muscles involved in articulation. However, in contrast to button-press tasks, the complex task of producing speech often resulted in multiple EMG bursts within the SR interval. This observation forced us to decide how to operationalize the point of fractionation: as the first EMG burst after stimulus onset (the stimulus-locked approach), or as the EMG burst that is coupled to the vocal response (the response-locked approach). The point of fractionation has direct consequences on how much of the overall task effect is captured by either interval. Therefore, the purpose of the current paper was to compare both onset-detection procedures in order to make an informed decision about which of the two is preferable. We concluded in favor or the response-locked approach.