The limitations of cascading in the speech production system

Abstract

Two competing views on how information flows in the speech production system are discussed. The full-cascading view holds that all activated concepts automatically activate their lexical and phonological representations. The limited-cascading view holds that a selection procedure interrupts the automatic flow of information through the speech production system. Recently, the full-cascading view has received support from the observation that ignored pictures activate their phonological representation. In two experiments the conditions to observe this finding were examined. Using coloured pictures to name, we replicated the finding that when the picture's name is phonologically related to the name of its colour, the colour-naming task is facilitated compared with when the name of the picture is unrelated. We also show that this effect is stronger when naming the picture has been practiced. By contrast, the colour's name has no effect on naming the picture, not even when colour naming is practiced. We conclude that strong versions of both the full-cascading view and the limited-cascading view cannot account for the complete set of data.