Abstract
Studies of word production often make use of picture-naming tasks, including the picture-word-interference task. In this task, participants name pictures with superimposed distractor words. They typically need more time to name pictures when the distractor word is semantically related to the picture than when it is unrelated (the semantic interference effect). The present study examines the distributional properties of this effect in a series of Bayesian meta-analyses. Meta-analytic estimates of the semantic interference effect first show that the effect is present throughout the reaction time distribution and that it increases throughout the distribution. Second, we find a correlation between a participant’s mean semantic interference effect and the change in the effect in the tail of the reaction time distribution, which has been argued to reflect the involvement of selective inhibition in the naming task. Finally, we show with simulated data that this correlation emerges even when no inhibition is used to generate the data, which suggests that inhibition is not needed to explain this relationship.
Highlights
The cognitive processes underlying word production are often assessed using picture-naming tasks
Our analyses provide evidence that the semantic interference effect is present over the entire distribution and increases with response times
Our analyses suggest that the semantic interference effect increases with response times
Summary
The cognitive processes underlying word production are often assessed using picture-naming tasks. Shao et al (2015) found that the slope of the fastest delta plot segment was correlated with the magnitude of the semantic interference effect in one of two picture-wordinterference experiments (but not in two experiments using a semantic blocking task) The fact that they saw a relationship with the slope of the slowest delta segment, but not with the fastest (with the exception of the one experiment), was taken to lend support to claims made by the activation suppression hypothesis by Ridderinkhof et al (2004)—that inhibition takes time to build up and is mostly reflected in the slope of the slowest delta segment. Our analyses provide evidence that the semantic interference effect is present over the entire distribution and increases with response times They confirm the correlation between effect size and slowest as well as fastest segments, both by participant and by item. These results lead us to consider an alternative account of this relationship, which we examine using simulations
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