Katherine White

• Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology
• Professor (Full) at Rhodes College

Emotional content, specifically negative valence, can differentially influence speech production in younger and older adults’ autobiographical narratives, which have been interpreted as reflecting age differences in emotion regulation. However, age differences in emotional reactivity are another possible explanation, as younger and older adults fre...

Strong emotional words tend to command attention and disrupt cognitive processing. Three experiments investigated whether taboo context, defined by the inclusion of taboo distractors in a picture-word interference task, influences how a distractor’s emotional properties affect speech production. Participants named target pictures accompanied by wri...

This research investigated whether precues engage proactive control to reduce emotional interference during speech production. A picture-word interference task required participants to name target pictures accompanied by taboo, negative, or neutral distractors. Proactive control was manipulated by presenting precues that signalled the type of distr...

While both semantic and highly emotional (i.e., taboo) words can interfere with speech production, different theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to explain why interference occurs. Two experiments investigated these theoretical approaches by comparing the magnitude of these two types of interference and the stages at which they occur during p...

Speaking is susceptible to distraction, illustrated by slowed picture naming in the presence of taboo distractor words. However, other distractors such as phonologically related words speed picture naming. Two experiments explored the simultaneous influences of these competing factors. Participants named target pictures superimposed with taboo, neg...

Objectives: This research investigated three potential asymmetries in the production and perception of homophone spelling errors: aging, homophone dominance, and priming. A homophone spelling error occurs when a contextually appropriate word (beet) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beat glaze). Two experiments investigated young and older adul...

Human language function is inextricably linked to memory in that the comprehension and production of language requires access to linguistic structures stored at various levels of abstraction and complexity. The act of producing even a single word requires (at a minimum) the retrieval of its semantic, lexical, syntactic, and phonological/orthographi...

Despite evidence that the majority of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states occur for proper names, little research has investigated factors that influence their resolution. Although phonological primes typically increase TOT resolution, the present experiment investigated whether priming effects are mitigated by semantic competition. Participants read qu...

Two experiments investigated age differences in how semantic, syntactic, and orthographic factors influence the production of homophone spelling errors in sentence contexts. Younger and older adults typed auditorily presented sentences containing homophone targets (e.g., blew) that were categorized as having a regular spelling (EW) or an irregular...

Previous research has suggested that similar to other age-related declines in language production, the ability to produce the correct spellings of words decreases in old age (e.g., Abrams & Stanley, 2004; MacKay & Abrams, 1998; MacKay, Abrams, & Pedroza, 1999; Stuart-Hamilton & Rabbitt, 1997). However, aging alone does not predict spelling deficits...

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had...

This research tested age-related differences in the retrieval of self-generated new associations under conditions that required intentional or incidental processing. Under intentional or incidental encoding conditions, young and older adults generated new associations by producing a response to a two-letter stem paired with a cue/prime word (e.g.,...

Three experiments investigated whether production of low-frequency spellings could be influenced by other words containing those spellings. Participants saw visually-presented primes (Experiment 1) or heard primes presented auditorily and produced their spelling (Experiments 2 and 3). Primes either shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., chapl...

Using the DRM paradigm, our experiments examined the activation and monitoring of memories in semantic and phonological networks. Participants viewed lists of words and/or pseudohomophones (e.g., dreem). In Experiment 1, participants verbally recalled lists of semantic associates or attempted to write them as they appeared during study. False recal...

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrot...

Homophones are words that share phonology but differ in meaning and spelling (e.g., beach, beech). This article presents the results of normative surveys that asked young and older adults to free associate to and rate the dominance of 197 homophones. Although norms exist for young adults on word familiarity and frequency for homophones, these resul...

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated phonologically mediated priming of preexisting and new associations in word retrieval. Young and older adults completed paired word stems with the first word that came to mind. Priming of preexisting associations occurred when word-stem pairs containing homophones (e.g., beech-s__) showed more completions...

Three experiments investigated the role of specific phonological components in priming tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) resolution. When in a TOT state, participants read a list of words that included phonological primes intermixed among unrelated words. The phonological primes contained either the same first letter as the target (Experiment 1), a single sy...

This experiment investigated whether phonological priming of syllables helps resolve tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states in young and older adults. Young, young-old, and old-old adults read general knowledge questions and responded "know," "TOT," or "don't know" accordingly. Participants then read a list of 10 words that included 3 phonological primes c...

This experiment investigated whether phonological priming of syllables helps resolve tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states in young and older adults. Young, young-old, and old-old adults read general knowledge questions and responded “know,” “TOT,” or “don’t know” accordingly. Participants then read a list of 10 words that included 3 phonological primes c...

A speech act in a story (e.g., ‘John said that Glenda is pregnant’) contains content (‘Glenda is pregnant’) that is potentially propagated among various agents in the storyworld. Knowledge propagation may spontaneously occur when speech acts are comprehended during reading, but our working assumption is that knowledge propagation primarily occurs w...