COLT seminar - Thursday 13th June 12:00h, Andreas Mädebach
COLT seminar - Thursday 13th June 12:00h, Andreas Mädebach
Words we do not say – Evidence for inflexible co-activation of non-selected alternative picture names
- Speaker: Andreas Mädebach
- When: Thursday 13th June, 12:00h
- Where: 52.323
Alternative picture names become phonologically coactivated even when they are not produced (e.g., the basic level name dog when the subordinate level name poodle is produced and vice versa). I will summarise the results from a series of picture naming experiments investigating whether this co-activation is flexibly modulated by contextual constraints or recent experience. In a first set of experiments, we contrasted contexts with and without pragmatic constraints on the picture name. In constraining contexts only the subordinate level name of a given picture was valid, whereas in non-constraining contexts both names were valid. Contexts were created (a) by a preceding request of an imaginary interlocutor (e.g., „name the dog“ vs. „name the animal“), (b) by the speakers own naming response in sequential naming tasks, or (c) by the response of a partner in a communication game in which communicative success required the consistent use of the subordinate level names. Phonological co-activation of the alternative basic-level names was not substantially attenuated in any of these constraining contexts. In a second set of experiments, we investigated whether the repeated use of one particular name attenuates phonological co-activation of an alternative name. Phonological co-activation of the alternative name appeared to remain stable across a large number of repetitions with both subordinate and basic-level target names. Overall, our results suggest that phonological co-activation of lexical alternatives is relatively inflexible and not substantially modulated by contextual constraints or incremental learning mechanisms in word production.
11.06.2019