Phonological Facilitation from Pictures in a Word Association Task: Evidence for Routine Cascaded Processing in Spoken Word Production

While most authors now agree that the language production system is in principle cascaded, the strength with which cascaded lemma-to-phoneme activation typically occurs is debated. Picture naming has been shown to be facilitated by phonologically related distractor pictures, but no such facilitation from pictures has been shown for word reading. Picture-picture paradigms have recently been suggested to represent an attentionally facilitated and unusually strong case of cascaded phonological facilitation, not typical of a more general weakly cascaded production system. We used a novel procedure based on picture-word interference paradigms, where participants made speeded verbal free association responses to presented words, with irrelevant picture distractors that were phonologically related to their predicted high-associate responses. Phonological facilitation effects from related picture names were observed on free associate verbal production latencies. These findings represent a far more general demonstration of routine cascaded language production and suggest that the strength and extent of cascaded activation is more substantial than that suggested by traditional picture-word paradigms.