Temporal Organization of Phonological and Phonetic Encoding: Evidence from Experiments and Spontaneous Speech

The interaction between pauses and the retrieval of the desired lexemes in the process of word production involves controversies that are worth investigating. The hypothesis of the present research was that certain pauses might refer to specific operations in the mental lexicon predicting the phonetic output. The temporal analysis of word retrieval was carried out in a ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ elicitation experiment while pauses (i) marking the speaker’s word finding trouble and (ii) preceding restarts and repetitions were measured in spontaneous speech. Results confirmed the existence of specific temporal organization underlying lexical access: a significantly different amount of time was measured depending on the subprocesses and on the mode of word retrieval between concept and articulation.