Speakers preplan lexical and phonological representations in semantically constraining linguistic contexts.

Abstract

Rapid turn-taking in conversation suggests that speakers plan part of their turn in advance, but evidence for this is scarce. Using context-driven picture naming, we examined whether (a) speakers preplan lexical-semantic and phonological information at the word level in constraining sentential contexts, and (b) phonological preplanning encompasses the whole word. Analysis of naming response times (RTs) showed that constraining contexts enable preplanning of both lexical-semantic and phonological representations (Experiment 1). Using a picture-word interference version of the same task (Experiment 2), we found that speakers preplan the phonological form of the whole word, however, only the subset of constraining trials with the shortest RTs indicated preplanning. The results confirm previous findings from turn-taking, which suggested that speakers can complete later stages of lexical access in advance, but also highlight that the presence of preplanning varies from trial to trial.