On-Line Methodologies for Studying the Written Production of Isolated Words: A Brief Overview

Abstract

This chapter is aimed at presenting some on-line methodologies dedicated to the investigation of the written production of isolated words. We give specific descriptions and illustrations of three on-line methodologies that can be specifically used to study the nature of the representations and of the processes involved in the written production of isolated words: picture naming tasks, interference paradigm and priming paradigm. We illustrate these methods with some examples taken from various spoken picture naming studies and we briefly show how these methodologies have significantly contributed to improve our knowledge on the nature of the representations involved in spoken language production and their time course of activation. Along with this presentation, we describe how we have adapted these methods to investigate the representations and the processes involved in the written production of isolated words from pictures. Likewise, we present two series of studies that have made use of the interference paradigm. One investigated the obligatory phonological mediation issue in written picture naming. Another study addressed the time course of activation of semantic representations and orthographic/phonological representations. A potential problem associated with the use of the interference paradigm is also briefly addressed. Finally, we report a priming study that addressed the question of whether orthographic codes can be retrieved directly from semantics in the written production of words from pictures.