Phonological advance planning in sentence production

Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent–action–patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of the agent (encoded as sentence subject) and the patient (encoded as sentence object), auditory distractor words, which were either phonologically related to the subject, or to the object, or were unrelated to both, were used. Compared with the unrelated control condition, distractors related to the subject in the utterance-initial phrase facilitated the response, while distractors related to the subject or to the object appearing in a non-initial phrase interfered with the response. Because some automatic phonological activation resulting from the perceptual processing of the visual stimulus cannot be responsible for the object-related interference effects, our results suggest that phonological advance planning exceeds a single syntactic phrase and may even span a whole simple sentence. The data are discussed in the context of current models of phonological encoding.