Fast and slow errors: What naming latencies of errors reveal about the interplay of attentional control and word planning in speeded picture naming

Abstract

Speakers sometimes produce lexical errors, such as saying salt instead of pepper. This study aimed to better understand the origin of lexical errors by assessing whether they arise from a hasty selection and premature decision to speak (premature selection hypothesis) or from momentary attentional disengagement from the task (attentional lapse hypothesis). We analyzed data from a speeded picture naming task (Lampe et al., 2023) and investigated whether lexical errors are produced as fast as target (i.e., correct) responses, thus arising from premature selection, or whether they are produced more slowly than target responses, thus arising from lapses of attention. Using ex-Gaussian analyses, we found that lexical errors were slower than targets in the tail, but not in the normal part of the RT distribution, with the tail effect primarily resulting from errors that were not coordinates, i.e., members of the target’s semantic category. Moreover, we compared the coordinate errors and target responses in terms of their word-intrinsic properties, and found that they were overall more frequent, shorter and acquired earlier than targets. Given the present findings, we conclude that coordinate errors occur due to a premature selection but in the context of intact attentional control, following the same lexical constraints as targets, while other errors, given the variability in their nature, may vary in their origin, with one potential source being lapses of attention.