Mädebach*, A., Widmann*, A., Posch, M., Schröger, E., & Jescheniak, J. D. (2022). Hearing "Birch" Hampers Saying "Duck" – An ERP Study on Phonological Interference in Immediate and Delayed Word Production. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34(8), 1397-1415.

Hearing "Birch" Hampers Saying "Duck" – An ERP Study on Phonological Interference in Immediate and Delayed Word Production

Mädebach*, A., Widmann*, A., Posch, M., Schröger, E., & Jescheniak, J. D.

When speakers name a picture (e.g., “duck”), a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative name (e.g., “birch” related to “bird”) slows down naming responses compared to an unrelated distractor word. This interference effect obtained with the picture-word interference (PWI) task is assumed to reflect the phonological co-activation of close semantic competitors and is critical for evaluating contemporary models of word production. In the present study, we determined the event-related brain potential (ERP) signature of this effect in an immediate and a delayed version of the PWI task. ERPs revealed a differential processing of related and unrelated distractors: an early (305–436 ms) and a late (537–713 ms) negativity for related as compared with unrelated distractors. In the behavioral data, the interference effect was only found in immediate naming, while its ERP signature was also present in delayed naming. The time window of the earlier ERP effect suggests that the behavioral interference effect indeed emerges at a phonological processing level, while the functional significance of the later ERP effect is as yet not clear. The finding of a robust ERP correlate of phonological co-activation might facilitate future research on lexical processing in word production.