The Role of Sustained Attention in the Production of Conjoined Noun Phrases: An Individual Differences Study

It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon su...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-09, Vol.10 (9), p.e0137557-e0137557
Main Authors: Jongman, Suzanne R, Meyer, Antje S, Roelofs, Ardi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Alertness
Analysis
Attention
Attention - physiology
Attention task
Attentional bias
Cognitive biases
Conjunctions
Correlation analysis
Executive function
Female
Humans
Hypothesis testing
Individual differences
Individuality
Language
Linguistics
Male
Memory
Neuropsychological Tests
Noun phrases
Nouns
Phonetics
Phrases
Pictures
Psycholinguistics
Reaction Time - physiology
Response time
Semantics
Study abroad
Young Adult
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Summary:It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon sustained attention when they plan single noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot") and perform a manual arrow categorization task. In addition, we investigated whether speakers also recruit sustained attention when they produce conjoined noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot and the bucket") describing two pictures, that is, when both the first and second task are linguistic. We found that sustained attention correlated with the proportion of abnormally slow phrase-production responses. Individuals with poor sustained attention displayed a greater number of very slow responses than individuals with better sustained attention. Importantly, this relationship was obtained both for the production of single phrases while performing a nonlinguistic manual task, and the production of noun phrase conjunctions in referring to two spatially separated objects. Inhibition and updating abilities were also measured. These scores did not correlate with our measure of sustained attention, suggesting that sustained attention and executive control are distinct. Overall, the results suggest that planning conjoined noun phrases involves sustained attention, and that language production happens less automatically than has often been assumed.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0137557