Are higher-level processes delayed in second language word production? Evidence from picture naming and phoneme monitoring

There are clear disadvantages in the speed of word production and recognition in a second language (L2), relative to the first language (L1). Some accounts claim that these disadvantages occur because of a slow-down in lexical retrieval and phonological encoding. But it is also possible that the slow-down originates from a later part of the production process, namely articulatory planning or articulation. We used a phoneme monitoring task to study the time course of conceptualisation, lexical retrieval, and phonological encoding during language production in the absence of articulation. First, we demonstrated that there was indeed an L2 disadvantage of 102 ms in a picture-word interference (PWI) task with phonologically related and unrelated distractor words. Next, participants from the same population performed a combined phoneme monitoring task / PWI task with the same stimuli: they monitored for the occurrence of a phoneme in a picture name while ignoring a distractor word. In both the PWI task and the combined phoneme monitoring/PWI task, there was phonological facilitation, suggesting that both tasks are similar up to the level of phonological encoding. Importantly, L2 speakers were not slower in phoneme monitoring than L1 speakers. These findings suggest that the slow-down typically observed in L2 speech production may not be situated at phonological or pre-phonological stages of speech production, but rather in a later stage of speech production.