On the Interpretation of Onsets of Auditory Context Effects in Word Production

Abstract Six experiments are reported in which participants named pictures that were accompanied by auditorily presented distractors. Distractors that consisted of the first phonemes of the target names caused faster target-naming times than unrelated controls in a wide range of stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), including SOA −300 ms. In addition, two variables that influenced the onset of the phonological effect obtained with word distractors were identified, one of which was the presence or absence of a semantic manipulation in the experiment. The results (a) show that data patterns that had seemed to support strict-serial models of language production (Schriefers, Meyer, & Levelt, 1990) are in fact not univocally interpretable and (b) highlight that the interpretation of (onsets of) context effects cannot be made without clear assumptions about both language production and language perception.