Open Access

Mathias Barthel

• In conversation, speakers need to plan and comprehend language in parallel in order to meet the tight timing constraints of turn taking. Given that language comprehension and speech production planning both require cognitive resources and engage overlapping neural circuits, these two tasks may interfere with one another in dialogue situations. Interference effects have been reported on a number of linguistic processing levels, including lexicosemantics. This paper reports a study on semantic processing efficiency during language comprehension in overlap with speech planning, where participants responded verbally to questions containing semantic illusions. Participants rejected a smaller proportion of the illusions when planning their response in overlap with the illusory word than when planning their response after the end of the question. The obtained results indicate that speech planning interferes with language comprehension in dialogue situations, leading to reduced semantic processing of the incoming turn. Potential explanatory processing accounts are discussed.