Fast planning — fast production? The link between higher-level planning and acoustic duration in single word production

The mechanisms and representations underlying word production are studied in two literatures. Psycholinguistic models describe the processes going from the activation of a concept to the selection of abstract phonetic units, while speech motor control models describe how these units are translated into articulatory movements. Bridging the gap between these two literatures, we examine whether and how the timing of higher-level processes impacts articulation. We quantify the evidence for and against the claims that (1) the ease with which the abstract word form is encoded influences the acoustic duration of the articulated word, and (2) the duration of planning processes prior to articulation onset (as reflected in response latencies) predicts acoustic duration. We analyze three datasets in which participants named pictures with distractor words unrelated to the target words and distractors overlapping phonologically with the target words. Bayesian analyses provide evidence that this manipulation impacts naming latencies but does not impact articulation durations. Moreover, latencies predict acoustic durations when participants are pressured to respond quickly in a subset of trials, such that for trials with longer latencies, words are articulated with shorter durations. These findings provide new constraints for the architecture of the language production system.