Neural organization of speech production: A lesion-based study of error patterns in connected speech

Brielle C Stark; Alexandra Basilakos; Gregory Hickok; Chris Rorden; Leonardo Bonilha; Julius Fridriksson

While blocked cyclic picture naming is not true connected speech, it provides a multiword environment more complex than naming. These studies have found a semantic interference effect, such that naming semantically related pictures becomes increasingly slower when repeatedly naming from a semantic category even when several unrelated trials occur Oppenheim et al., 2010; Chang et al., 2012; Goldrick and Larson, 2016; Hughes and Schnur, 2017) . Semantic interference may result from lexical competition, such that competition grows more intense when retrieving words in a homogeneous context because of the growing number of competitors (i.e. semantically related words) but semantic interference may likewise result from impaired inhibition, such that lexical competitors cannot be suppressed 4 (Oppenheim et al., 2010) . It is an open question whether work on paradigms such as blocked cyclic picture naming will generalize to more natural speech.