Open Wide and Say ‘‘Blah!’’ Attentional Dynamics of Delayed Naming

In a well-known study, Balota and Chumbley (1985) used a delayed naming task to assess postperceptual word frequency effects. They observed frequency effects after considerable delays, suggesting that frequency sensitivity characterizes not only the perceptual stage, but also postaccess stages. The present investigation examined delayed naming in a dual-task. Using delays after perception and a constant response (‘‘blah’’) for all catch trials, we attained relatively pure indices of the mental workloads incurred by lowand high-frequency words. Across experiments, reliable frequency effects occurred in both word-naming and catch trials. The frequency effects can be modified by altering omnibus task difficulty, or by adding phonologically confusable memory loads. The results suggest that frequency effects in delayed naming (and their occasional absence in prior studies) partly reflect attentional differences. We describe a resonance framework in which word perception, rehearsal, and production all rely on stable feedback loops among knowledge structures. Attention is required both to create and to maintain feedback loops; each word’s level of attention demand is predicted by its frequency of previous occurrence. q 1997