Planning at the phonological level during sentence production

In two picture–word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short: determiner + noun + verb or long: determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response times to begin producing both types of sentences were faster in the presence of a related versus unrelated distractor. The results suggest that the activation of pho-nological properties of words outside the first phrase and first and second phonological word affect onset of articulation during sentence production. The results are discussed in the light of previous evidence of phonological planning during multi-word production. Implications for the phonological facilitation effect in the picture–word interference paradigm are also discussed. KEY WORDS: phonological encoding; planning; picture–word interference paradigm; sen-tence production