LEXICAL SELECTION AND PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING DURING LANGUAGE PRODUCTION - EVIDENCE FOR CASCADED PROCESSING

The time course of lexicalization during production was explored using a production priming procedure. Participants were presented with pict ures to name. Occasionally, a visual target word was presented followi ng a picture, and participants named the word. In Experiments 1A and 1 B, phonological priming was found for targets related to the dominant name of a picture, as well as for those related to a near-synonymous n ame. These results suggest that phonological activation occurs for mul tiple lexical candidates. In Experiments 2A and 2B, semantic priming w as found to arise earlier than phonological priming. In Experiment 3, no priming was found for words phonologically related to category asso ciates, suggesting that the activation of such items is weak. Overall, the results are supportive of a cascaded processing model of lexicali zation in which activation spreads continuously from semantic to phono logical levels of representation.