Preparation of unattached phonological fragments such as word-initial consonants has been conceived of as partial production and thus as revealing fundamental processes of phonological encoding in language production. However, recent evidence of flexible preparation (O’Séaghdha & Frazer, 2014) challenges the partial production view. Instead, preparation may be mediated by high-level attention to meta-linguistically accessible elements, such as starting points for phonological encoding. If so, preparation may occur even if it is often inapplicable. In a word naming experiment, preparation was equally present for sets containing three consistent items whether they were embedded with single or with multiple inconsistent exceptions. Unlike in previous work, preparation was not evident immediately after single inconsistent items. These results lead us to further specify the theory of attentional form preparation as follows: Preparation of starting points in word production not only involves sustained attention to an abstract symbolic construal of the current task situation (e.g., /b/s are relevant), but also opportunistic transient deployment of that construal in conjunction with target word selection. This proposal underscores the need for coordination among distinct processes of anticipatory preparation and actual word production. More broadly, phonological encoding provides a rich but underexplored domain for the study of complex attention.
Optimal stop word selection for text mining in critical infrastructure domain