Utterance planning under message uncertainty: evidence from a novel picture-naming paradigm.

Language researchers view utterance planning as implicit decision-making: producers must choose the words, sentence structures, and various other linguistic features to communicate their message. To date, much of the research on utterance planning has focused on situations in which the speaker knows the full message to convey. Less is known about circumstances in which speakers begin utterance planning before they are certain about their message. In three picture-naming experiments, we used a novel paradigm to examine how speakers plan utterances before a full message is known. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed displays showing two pairs of objects, followed by a cue to name one pair. In an Overlap condition, one object appeared in both pairs, providing early information about one of the objects to name. In a Different condition, there was no object overlap. Across both spoken and typed responses, participants tended to name the overlapping target first in the Overlap condition, with shorter initiation latencies compared with other utterances. Experiment 3 used a semantically constraining question to provide early information about the upcoming targets, and participants tended to name the more likely target first in their response. These results suggest that in situations of uncertainty, producers choose word orders that allow them to begin early planning. Producers prioritize message components that are certain to be needed and continue planning the rest when more information becomes available. Given similarities to planning strategies for other goal-directed behaviors, we suggest continuity between decision-making processes in language and other cognitive domains.

Repetition parallels in language and motor action: Evidence from tongue twisters and finger fumblers.

We investigated similarities in language and motor action plans by comparing errors in parallel speech and manual tasks. For the language domain, we adopted the "tongue twister" paradigm, while for the action domain, we developed an analogous key-pressing task, "finger fumblers." Our results show that both language and action plans benefit from reusing segments of prior plans: when onsets were repeated between adjacent units in a sequence, the error rates decreased. Our results also suggest that this facilitation is most effective when the planning scope is limited, that is, when participants plan ahead only to the next immediate units in the sequence. Alternatively, when the planning scope covers a wider range of the sequence, we observe more interference from the global structure of the sequence that requires changing the order of repeated units. We point to several factors that might affect this balance between facilitation and interference in plan reuse, for both language and action planning. Our findings support similar domain-general planning principles guiding both language production and motor action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Hysteresis in motor and language production.

Hysteresis in motor planning and syntactic priming in language planning refer to the influence of prior production history on current production behaviour. Computational efficiency accounts of action hysteresis and theoretical accounts of syntactic priming both argue that reusing an existing plan is less costly than generating a novel plan. Despite these similarities across motor and language frameworks, research on planning in these domains has largely been conducted independently. The current study adapted an existing language paradigm to mirror the incremental nature of a manual motor task to investigate the presence of parallel hysteresis effects across domains. We observed asymmetries in production choice for both the motor and language tasks that resulted from the influence of prior history. Furthermore, these hysteresis effects were more exaggerated for subordinate production forms implicating an inverse preference effect that spanned domain. Consistent with computational efficiency accounts, across both task participants exhibited reaction time savings on trials in which they reused a recent production choice. Together, these findings lend support to the broader notion that there are common production biases that span both motor and language domains.