Séminaire de l'Axe 1 "Sciences Cognitives et Computation" (COCOSCI). Intervenant : F.-Xavier Alario (Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université et CNRS).
The stages involved in mental information processing can be distinguished on the basis of various criteria, including the timing with which they operate. There, a primary distinction has been made between sequential and parallel architectures. Donders’s (1868/1969) influential hypothesis and its variants postulate that cognitive stages can operate sequentially, that is, without temporal overlap.
An alternative view postulates parallel (i.e. concurrent) processing across cognitive stages (McClelland, 1979).The contrast between sequential and parallel processing has played a major role in organising discussions of language production theories. The relatively recent adoption of neurophysiological measures (EEG, MEG) to study language and speech production held the promise of providing new insights on this issue. These recordings boast millisecond temporal resolution, and thus could provide a window on the processing steps between stimulus and response.
In this conference, F.-Xavier Alario (Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université et CNRS) will present a review of the literature that used MEG to investigate word production (Munding et al. 2016), and a study based on intracerebral data (Dubarry et al., 2017). Both invite careful conclusions about the distinction between sequential and parallel processing in language production.
