Serial order in word form retrieval: New insights from the auditory picture-word interference task

One important theoretical question about word production concerns whether the phonemes of a word are retrieved in parallel or in sequential order. To address this question, Meyer and Schriefers (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17:1146–1160, 1991) used an auditory picture–word interference task and manipulated the position of the phonemes shared between a distractor word and a target picture. They found that begin-related distractors (e.g., boat–bone) facilitated naming times when they were presented within 150 ms before or after the picture, whereas end-related distractors (e.g., cone–bone) were effective only if presented within 150 ms after the picture. This suggested that the word’s end phonemes were activated later than the beginning ones. However, it remained unclear whether these effects genuinely reflected facilitation at the level of phonological retrieval. In this study, we examined later distractor presentation onsets, so that the distractors had little opportunity to influence earlier, lexical selection processes. At the latest onset tested, end-related—but not begin-related—distractors significantly facilitated naming. We concluded that late-presented distractors do indeed influence phonological encoding, and that their asymmetric effects support a sequential model of phoneme retrieval.