Publications

Background: Discourse production is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. There is a growing body of research on discourse production in persons with aphasia (PWA) but one understudied aspect of discourse production is the use of discourse particles. Understanding the role of discourse particles in PWA is crucial given the recent …

Power decreases, or desynchronization, of sensorimotor alpha and beta oscillations (i.e., alpha and beta ERD) have long been considered as indices of sensorimotor control in overt speech production. However, their specific functional roles are not well understood. Hence, we first conducted a systematic review to investigate how these …

Language control in bilingual speakers is thought to be implicated in effectively switching between languages, inhibiting the non-intended language, and continuously monitoring what to say and what has been said. It has been a matter of controversy concerning whether language control operates in a comparable manner to cognitive …

Previous studies have found EEG amplitude and scalp topography differences between neurotypical and neurological/neurosurgical groups, being interpreted at the cognitive level. However, these comparisons are invariably accompanied by anatomical changes. Critical to EEG are the so-called volume currents, which are affected by the …

Multilingual language control is commonly investigated using picture-naming paradigms with explicit instructions when to switch between languages. In daily life, language-switching also occurs without external cues. Cued language-switching tasks usually show a switch cost (i.e., slower responses on switch than non-switch trials). …

Historically, memory and language have been seen as separate cognitive functions and studied in isolation. To date, it remains an open question to what extent these cognitive domains are related. The central question in this paper is how we should see the relationship between the domains of language and memory. We discuss relevant …

Studies investigating language commonly isolate one language modality or process, focusing on comprehension or production. We aim to combine both in the new Concise Language Paradigm (CLaP), tapping into comprehension and production within one trial. The trial structure is identical across conditions, presenting an auditory sentence …

Word production and comprehension both require mapping between the meaning, form, and syntactical representations of the word. We refer to the collective set of processes involved in performing this mapping as lexical selection. In the field of word production research, how lexical selection is carried out in the brain is studied …

A major issue concerning inflectional encoding in spoken word production is whether or not regular forms (e.g., past tense walked) are encoded by rule application and irregular forms (e.g., swam) by retrieval from associative memory and inhibition of the regular rule. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine …

In the past decade, the well-established psycholoinguistics tradition of behavioural measures to study language production has been increasingly complemented with electrophysiological investigations. As a direct measure of net neuronal activity, the electrophysiological signal has excellent temporal resolution, which is critical for …

In the present study, we used chronometric TMS to probe the time-course of 3 brain regions during a picture naming task. The left inferior frontal gyrus, left posterior middle temporal gyrus, and left posterior superior temporal gyrus were all separately stimulated in 1 of 5 time-windows (225, 300, 375, 450, and 525 ms) from picture …

Background: Information about cognitive functioning is vital in the management of stroke, but the literature is mostly based on data from individuals older than 50 years of age who make up the majority of the stroke population. As cognitive functioning is subject to change due to ageing, it is unclear whether such cognitive …

In context-driven picture naming studies, pictures are named faster following constraining (e.g., The leaves fall from the, picture: TREE) relative to nonconstraining (e.g., The family played by the, picture: TREE) sentences, indicating that word planning starts prior to target picture onset. Power decreases in the …

Clinical populations with basal ganglia pathologies may present with language production impairments, which are often described in combination with comprehension measures or attributed to motor, memory, or processing-speed problems. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we studied word production in four (vascular and …

Lexical access is commonly studied using bare picture naming, which is visually guided, but in real-life conversation, lexical access is more commonly contextually guided. In this fMRI study, we examined the underlying functional neuroanatomy of contextually and visually guided lexical access, and its consistency across sessions. We …

Lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) studies have revealed brain areas critical for naming, typically finding significant associations between damage to left temporal, inferior parietal and inferior fontal regions and impoverished naming performance. However, specific subregions found in the available literature vary. Hence, the aim of this …

Our understanding of post-stroke language function is largely based on older age groups, who show increasing age-related brain pathology and neural reorganisation. To illustrate language outcomes in the young-adult brain, we present the case of J., a 23 y.o. woman with chronic aphasia from a left-hemisphere stroke affecting the …

Background: For speakers with mild to moderate expressive aphasia the ultimate goal of aphasia therapy is to improve verbal functional communication, which may be assessed with the Amsterdam-Nijmegen Test for Everyday Language (ANELT; Blomert et al., 1995). The ANELT is based on a qualitative and transcription-less method of …

Alpha and beta power decreases have been associated with prediction in a variety of cognitive domains. Recent studies in sentence comprehension have also reported alpha and/or beta power decreases preceding contextually predictable words, albeit with remarkable spatiotemporal variability across reports. To contribute to the …

Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution …

Source reconstruction of magnetoencephalography (MEG) has been used to assess brain reorganization after brain damage, such as stroke. Lesions result in parts of the brain having an electrical conductivity that differs from the normal values. The effect this has on the forward solutions (i.e., the propagation of electric currents and …

The biological foundation for the language-ready brain in the human lineage remains a debated subject. In humans, the arcuate fasciculus (AF) white matter and the posterior portions of the middle temporal gyrus are crucial for language. Compared with other primates, the human AF has been shown to dramatically extend into the …

Background: People with gliomas need specialized neurosurgical, neuro-oncological, psycho-oncological, and neuropsychological care. The role of language and cognitive recovery and rehabilitation in patients’ well-being and resumption of work is crucial, but there are no clear guidelines for the ideal timing and character of …

Background: With a growing, younger population of head and neck cancer survivors, attention to long-term side-effects of prior, often radiotherapeutic, treatment is warranted. Therefore, we studied the long-term cognitive effects in young adult patients irradiated for head and neck neoplasms (HNN). Methods: Young to middle-aged …

Objective: While declarative learning is dependent on the hippocampus, procedural learning and repetition priming can operate independently from the hippocampus, making them potential targets for behavioral interventions that utilize non-declarative memory systems to compensate for the declarative learning deficits associated with …

Alpha- and beta-band oscillatory power decreases have been consistently found in spoken-word production, and localized to left lateral-temporal and lateral-frontal lobes (e.g., Piai et al., 2015; Roos & Piai, 2020). These oscillations have been linked to both motor preparation and conceptual and lexical retrieval processes (Piai …

Idioms can have both a literal interpretation and a figurative interpretation (e.g., to “kick the bucket”). Which interpretation should be activated can be disambiguated by a preceding context (e.g., “The old man was sick. He kicked the bucket.”). We investigated whether the idiomatic and literal uses of idioms have different …

Purpose: The three variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) differ in clinical presentation, underlying brain pathology, and clinical course, which stresses the need for early differentiation. However, brief cognitive tests that validly distinguish between all PPA variants are lacking. The Sydney Language Battery (SYDBAT) is a …

Background: Neurocognition and speech, relevant domains in head and neck cancer (HNC), may be affected pretreatment. However, the prevalence of pretreatment deficits and their possible concurrent predictors are poorly understood. Methods: Using an HNC prospective cohort (Netherlands Quality of Life and Biomedical Cohort Study, N ≥ …

Lemma representations are thought to map the meaning of words to their sounds and vice-versa (Levelt et al., 1999). There is evidence using different methodologies that suggests that lemmas are localised in the middle portion of the left middle temporal gyrus (Indefrey & Levelt, 2004). However, according to another view, sound to …

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by cardinal motor symptoms, including resting tremor, rigidity and bradykinesia, and cognitive impairments, such as deficits in executive function, attention and short-term memory. Beyond these issues, patients frequently report morphosyntax, lexical-semantic and …

Speaking is not only about retrieving words and structuring them into sentences, but it also requires top-down control to plan and execute speech. In previous electrophysiological research with young-adult speakers, mid-frontal theta oscillations have been observed using a picture-word interference paradigm. With this paradigm, …

Retrieval from semantic memory of conceptual and lexical information is essential for producing speech. It is unclear whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms of conceptual and lexical retrieval when spreading activation through semantic memory is initiated by verbal or nonverbal settings. The same twenty participants …

One of the challenges in speech perception is that listeners must deal with considerable segmental and suprasegmental variability in the acoustic signal due to differences between talkers. Most previous studies have focused on how listeners deal with segmental variability. In this EEG experiment, we investigated whether listeners …

Purpose: This systematic review focuses on the effect of bilateral Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) of the Subthalamic Nucleus (STN) on language function in Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It fills an important gap in recent reviews, by considering other language tasks in addition to verbal fluency. Methods: We critically and systematically …

The literature on repetition priming in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is inconsistent, with some findings supporting spared priming while others do not. Several factors may explain these inconsistencies, including AD severity (e.g., dementia vs. Mild Cognitive Impairment; MCI) and priming paradigm-related characteristics. This systematic …

Objective: Large structural brain changes, such as chronic stroke lesions, alter the current pathways throughout the patients’ head and therefore have to be taken into account when performing transcranial direct current stimulation simulations. Approach: We implement, test and distribute the first MATLAB pipeline that …

Foreign language attrition (FLA) appears to be driven by interference from other, more recently-used languages (Mickan et al., 2020). Here we tracked these interference dynamics electrophysiologically to further our understanding of the underlying processes. Twenty-seven Dutch native speakers learned 70 new Italian words over two …

The cognitive architecture that allows humans to retrieve words from the mental lexicon has been investigated for decades. While there is consensus regarding a two-step architecture involving lexical-conceptual and phonological word form levels of processing, accounts of how activation spreads between them (e.g. in a serial, …

Three-dimensional (3D) technologies are being used for patient education. For glioma, a personalized 3D model can show the patient specific tumor and eloquent areas. We aim to compare the amount of information that is understood and can be recalled after a pre-operative consult using a 3D model (physically printed or in Augmented …

Word-production theories argue that during language production, a concept activates multiple lexical candidates in left temporal cortex, and the intended word is selected from this set. Evidence for theories on spoken-word production comes, for example, from the picture-word interference task, where participants name pictures …

The presence of white matter lesions in patients with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is among the main causes of cognitive decline. We investigated the relation between white matter hyperintensity (WMH) locations and executive and language abilities in 442 SVD patients without dementia with varying burden of WMH. We used Stroop …

Recent studies have suggested that language production abilities decline in patients with small vessel disease (SVD) a pathology that is one of the main contributors of cognitive impairment in older adults. The loss of microstructural integrity in multiple white-matter fiber pathways has been previously associated with cognitive …

Behavioral and classical electrophysiological methods (scalp EEG) provide important information about the timing of different processes involved in spoken word production, while functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows the localization of these mechanisms. However, these techniques do not allow for both spatial and …

On a prominent account, lemma representations map the meaning of words to their sounds and vice-versa, and are shared across production and comprehension (Levelt et al., 1999). A meta-analysis of word production studies suggests that lemmas are localised in the middle of the left middle temporal gyrus (left mMTG) (Indefrey, 2011; …

The left hemisphere (LH) is dominant for language in the majority of the healthy population. Patients with LH-damage may show global right-hemisphere (RH) activity for language. This makes interhemispheric transfer a good candidate for a brain plasticity mechanism through which speaking abilities may recover. However, the brain …

According to a prominent account, lemmas are abstract word representations that act as central relay hub for accessing conceptual, phonological, and syntactic representations linked to a word (Levelt et al., 1999). They are crucial for both speaking, accessing phonological representations from conceptual input, and listening, …

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical neurodegenerative syndrome with word finding problems as a core clinical symptom. Many aspects of word finding have been clarified in psycholinguistics using picture naming and a picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm, which emulates naming under contextual noise. However, little is …

Long-term outcomes of early implanted, young adult cochlear implant (CI) users remain variable. We measured auditory discrimination by means of event-related potentials in this population to examine whether variability at the level of cortical auditory processing helps to explain speech abilities. Using an auditory oddball paradigm, …

Flexible language use requires coordinated functioning of two systems: conceptual representations and control. The interaction between two systems can be observed when people are asked to matcha word to a picture. Participants are slower and less accurate for related word-picture pairs (word:banana, picture: apple) relative to …

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative language disorder. Despite recent research, this disorder is studied less than vascular aphasia. There are three main accepted variants: nonfluent/agrammatic PPA (nfv-PPA), semantic PPA (sv-PPA) and logopenic PPA (lv-PPA). Research that looks into the spontaneous language …

The supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas (SMA and pre-SMA) has been suggested as involved in language processing since the early ages of electrical stimulation mapping. However they received far less attention in this sense than the classic, perisylvian areas. Recent updates in the neuroanatomy allowed to revisit the …

Changes in brain organization following damage are commonly observed, but they remain poorly understood. These changes are often studied with imaging techniques that overlook the temporal granularity at which language processes occur. By contrast, electrophysiological measures provide excellent temporal resolution. To test the …

Language impairment in brain tumour patients may be missed since standardised tests fail to capture mild deficits. Neuroplasticity may also contribute to minimising language impairments. To address this possibility, we examined 14 patients with language dominant hemipsheric brain tumours prior to their first surgery using …

In context-driven word production, picture naming is faster following constrained than neutral sentential contexts (e.g., “The farmer milked the… [picture]” vs. “The child drew a… [picture]”, followed by the picture of a cow), suggesting conceptual-lexical pre-activation of the target response. Power decreases in the alpha-beta …

According to a prominent account of inflectional encoding (Pinker, 1999; Pinker & Ullman, 2002b), regular forms are encoded by a rule-governed combination of stems and affixes, whereas irregular forms are retrieved from memory while inhibiting rule application. Sahin, Pinker, and Halgren (2006) suggested that this concerns a …

Verbal fluency is commonly used to evaluate cognitive dysfunction in a variety of neuropsychiatric diseases, yet the neurobiology underlying performance of this task is incompletely understood. Electrocorticography (ECoG) provides a unique opportunity to investigate temporal activation patterns during cognitive tasks with high …

While much progress has been made in how brain organization supports language function, the language network’s ability to adapt to immediate disturbances by means of reorganization remains unclear. The aim of this study was to examine acute reorganizational changes in brain activity related to conceptual and lexical retrieval …

Background.   The impact of treatment for head and neck cancer (HNC) on speech and cognitive functioning is well studied. Moreover, recent research has identified speech and cognitive deficits in HNC patients already prior to treatment, but this baseline cognitive impairment is poorly understood. Importantly, chronic alcohol intake …

In conversation, speech planning can overlap with listening to the interlocutor. It has been postulated that once there is enough information to formulate a response, planning is initiated and the response is maintained in working memory. Concurrently, the auditory input is monitored for the turn end such that responses can be …

Language production involves the retrieval of information from memory, the planning of an articulatory programme, and executive control and self-monitoring. These processes can be related to the domains of long-term memory, motor control, and executive control. Here, we argue that studying neuronal oscillations provides an important …

The left temporal lobe is claimed to be involved in language comprehension in both the classical (Wernicke, 1874) and contemporary dual-pathway models for language processing (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007, Roelofs, 2014), but the role of neuroanatomical subcomponents of this lobe in distinct facets of lexical-semantic processing has …

While neuroimaging research on language production has traditionally focused primarily on grey matter, several recent studies highlight the involvement of ventral and dorsal white matter pathways. A debated issue concerns the exact functional role of these pathways. The ventral pathway has been suggested to underlie top-down control …

The frontal aslant tract (FAT) is a white matter structure joining the anterior supplementary and pre-supplementary motor area (SMA and pre-SMA) to the inferior and middle frontal gyri. FAT shows leftward asymmetry (Catani et al., 2012), which suggests its role in language processing. Although previous studies showed the contribution …

In a typical conversation, listening and speaking go hand in hand. However, we do not yet know what cognitive machinery and brain areas are shared between production and comprehension. It is believed that the lexical (lemma) and conceptual levels are shared between listening and speaking (Levelt et al., 1999). In this project, we …

Although the episodic and semantic memory systems have long been studied separately, recent literature revealed shared neural substrates, including the medial temporal lobe (MTL). One important aspect of semantic memory is semantic control, which tailors automatic spreading activation during concept retrieval between highly related …

The cognitive processes and neural mechanisms supporting language production have received considerably less research attention than those involved in language comprehension. This situation is partly attributable to the methodological challenges involved in acquiring electrophysiological and neuroimaging data during overt speech. …

Human language is organized along two main processing streams connecting posterior temporal cortex and inferior frontal cortex in the left hemisphere, travelling dorsal and ventral to the Sylvian fissure. Some views propose a dorsal motor versus ventral semantic division. Others propose division by combinatorial mechanism, with the …

We documented cognitive and speech functioning before treatment in individuals with head and neck cancer in a prospective cohort study. Results indicated a high prevalence of speech and cognitive impairment. Patient-reported speech and cognitive function were associated with each other, whereas objective cognitive measures were not associated with patient-reported measures.

Intracranial electrophysiological recording in humans has been a long-standing technique in neurosurgical treatment for epilepsy. Due to the clinical constraints as well as the necessity to map critical language sites prior to resection of tissue, electrode coverage often involves brain areas relevant for language function. This …

Unraveling the causes and pathomechanisms of progressive disorders is essential for the development of therapeutic strategies. Here, we identified heterozygous pathogenic missense variants of LMX1A in two families of Dutch origin with progressive nonsyndromic hearing impairment (HI), using whole exome sequencing. One variant, …

According to the competition account of lexical selection in word production, conceptually driven word retrieval involves the activation of a set of candidate words in left temporal cortex and competitive selection of the intended word from this set, regulated by frontal cortical mechanisms. However, the relative contribution of …

The neural basis of reading and writing has been a source of inquiry as well as controversy in the neuroscience literature. Reading has been associated with both left posterior ventral temporal zones (termed the “visual word form area”) as well as more dorsal zones, primarily in left parietal cortex. Writing has also been …

Background: Although language deficits after awake brain surgery are usually milder than post stroke, postoperative language assessments are needed to identify these. Follow-up of brain tumor patients in certain geographical regions can be difficult when most patients are not local and come from afar. We developed a short …

Objective: We report the case of a professional violin player who underwent an awake craniotomy to resect a tumour in the left supplementary motor area, an area involved in motor planning. Method: A careful pre- and intraoperative monitoring plan for music performance and complex motor function was established that could be used in …

Picture naming is a language task that involves multiple neural networks and is used to probe aphasia-induced language deficits. The pattern of neural activation seen in healthy individuals during picture naming is disrupted in individuals with aphasia, but the time-course of the disruption remains unclear. Specifically, it remains …

Studies suggest that alpha–beta power decreases index word retrieval in context-driven word production. We recorded the electroencephalogram from patients with stroke lesions encompassing the left lateral-temporal and inferior-parietal regions or left lateral-frontal lobe. Results indicate a critical role for the left posterior, but not frontal cortex, in generating the alpha–beta power decreases underlying context‐driven word production.

The response to an upcoming salient event is accelerated when the event is expected given the preceding events i.e. a temporal context effect. For example, naming a picture following a strongly constraining temporal context is faster than naming a picture after a weakly constraining temporal context. We used sentences as …

In picture-word interference experiments, participants name pictures (e.g., of a cat) while trying to ignore distractor words. Mean response time (RT) is typically longer with semantically related distractor words (e.g., dog) than with unrelated words (e.g., shoe), called semantic interference. Previous research has examined the RT …

Our understanding of neuroplasticity following stroke is predominantly based on neuroimaging measures that cannot address the subsecond neurodynamics of impaired language processing. We combined behavioral and electrophysiological measures and structural-connectivity estimates to characterize neuroplasticity underlying successful …

Language is typically studied in isolation from memory. We demonstrate that the same neuronal computations used by the hippocampus for memory also subserve online language usage. These findings represent a major step in integrating the studies of language and memory, significantly expanding the role of hippocampal theta oscillations.

Speaking is an action that requires control, for example, to prevent interference from distracting or competing information present in the speaker’s environment. Control over task performance is thought to depend on the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the neuroimaging literature does not show a consistent relation …

Munding, Dubarry, and Alario (this issue) courageously and thoroughly summarise the MEG literature on word production. It is evident that their task was a real undertaking and word production researchers should applaud their efforts. In this commentary, I raise a few issues that are inspired by their report. These comments are not …

Recently, the field of spoken-word production has seen an increasing interest in the use of the electroencephalogram (EEG), mainly for event-related potentials (ERPs). These are exciting times to be a language production researcher. However, no matter how much we would like our results to speak to our theories, they can only do so if …

Disagreement exists about how bilingual speakers select words, in particular, whether words in another language compete, or competition is restricted to a target language, or no competition occurs. Evidence that competition occurs but is restricted to a target language comes from response time (RT) effects obtained when speakers name …

When engaged in a conversation, speakers sometimes have to withhold a planned response, for example, before it is their turn to speak. In the present study, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) outside of a conversational setting, we investigate the oscillatory brain mechanisms involved in the process of withholding a planned verbal …

Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) …

Two major components form the basis of spoken word production: the access of conceptual and lexical/phonological information in long-term memory, and motor preparation and execution of an articulatory programme. Whereas the motor aspects of word production have been well characterised as reflected in alpha-beta desynchronisation, the …

Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with superimposed semantically related …

A hotly debated issue concerning spoken word production is whether lexical selection is by competition or not. Recently, Mahon, Garcea, and Navarrete (2012) claimed that associative facilitation from color-related words in the Stroop task challenges lexical competition accounts of word production, such as implemented in the WEAVER++ …

When making statistical comparisons, the temporal dimension of the EEG signal introduces problems. Guthrie and Buchwald (1991) proposed a formally correct statistical approach that deals with these problems: comparing waveforms by counting the number of successive significant univariate tests and then contrasting this number to a …

According to a prominent theory of language production, concepts activate multiple associated words in memory, which enter into competition for selection. However, only a few electrophysiological studies have identified brain responses reflecting competition. Here, we report a magnetoencephalography study in which the activation of …

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a …

Accumulating evidence suggests that some degree of attentional control is required to regulate and monitor processes underlying speaking. Although progress has been made in delineating the neural substrates of the core language processes involved in speaking, substrates associated with regulatory and monitoring processes have …

Two fundamental factors affecting the speed of spoken word production are lexical frequency and sentential constraint, but little is known about their timing and electrophysiological basis. In the present study, we investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) and oscillatory brain responses induced by these factors, using a task in …

Particle verbs (e.g., look up) are lexical items for which particle and verb share a single lexical entry. Using event-related brain potentials, we examined working memory and longterm memory involvement in particle-verb processing. Dutch participants read sentences with head verbs that allow zero, two, or more than five particles to …

A fundamental issue in psycholinguistics concerns how speakers retrieve intended words from long-term memory. According to a selection-by-competition account (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, 1999), conceptually driven word retrieval involves the activation of a set of candidate words and a competitive selection of the intended word …

Roelofs, Piai, and Schriefers argue that several findings on the effect of distractor words and pictures in producing words support a selection-by-competition account and challenge a non-competitive response-exclusion account. Janssen argues that the findings do not challenge response exclusion, and he conjectures that both …

Researchers have found no agreement on whether dual-task interference in language performance, such as dual-task interference from tone discrimination on picture naming, reflects passive queuing or active scheduling of processes for each task. According to a passive-queuing account, while a central response-selection bottleneck is …

Whereas it has long been assumed that competition plays a role in lexical selection in word production (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), recently Finkbeiner and Caramazza (2006) argued against the competition assumption on the basis of their observation that visible distractors yield semantic interference in picture naming, …

Pictureword interference is a widely employed paradigm to investigate lexical access in word production: Speakers name pictures while trying to ignore superimposed distractor words. The distractor can be congruent to the picture (pictured cat, word cat), categorically related (pictured cat, word dog), or unrelated (pictured cat, word …

For several decades, context effects in picture naming and word reading have been extensively investigated. However, researchers have found no agreement on the explanation of the effects. Whereas it has long been assumed that several types of effect reflect competition in word selection (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), …

Attention and language are among the most intensively researched abilities in the cognitive neurosciences, but the relation between these abilities has largely been neglected.There is increasing evidence, however, that linguistic processes, such as those underlying the planning of words, cannot proceed without paying some form of …

It has been argued that inhibition is a mechanism of attentional control in bilingual language performance. Evidence suggests that effects of inhibition are largest in the tail of a response time (RT) distribution in non-linguistic and monolingual performance domains. We examined this for bilingual performance by conducting …

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These fmdings were …

Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition predicts semantic interference from distractor words in immediate but not in delayed picture naming. In contrast, Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) obtained semantic interference in delayed picture naming when …