Abstract
Long-lasting interference effects in picture naming are induced when objects are presented in categorically related contexts in both continuous and blocked cyclic paradigms. Less consistent context effects have been reported when the task is changed to semantic classification. Experiment 1 confirmed the recent finding of cumulative facilitation in the continuous paradigm with living/non-living superordinate categorization. To avoid a potential confound involving participants responding with the identical superordinate category in related contexts in the blocked cyclic paradigm, we devised a novel set of categorically related objects that also varied in terms of relative age – a core semantic type associated with the adjective word class across languages. Experiment 2 demonstrated the typical interference effect with these stimuli in basic level naming. In Experiment 3, using the identical blocked cyclic paradigm, we failed to observe semantic context effects when the same pictures were classified as younger–older. Overall, the results indicate the semantic context effects in the two paradigms do not share a common origin, with the effect in the continuous paradigm arising at the level of conceptual representations or in conceptual-to-lexical connections while the effect in the blocked cyclic paradigm most likely originates at a lexical level of representation. The implications of these findings for current accounts of long-lasting interference effects in spoken word production are discussed.
Highlights
The mechanism by which words are retrieved from the mental lexicon for production remains a topic of considerable debate
The effect of response type was not significant in the linear mixed effects model, suggesting the findings with the conventional ANOVA approach might be due to averaging of data across items or participants, and so are not reliable
We can be confident that our novel object stimuli induce the typical semantic context effect in the blocked cyclic paradigm with basic level naming despite varying in terms of relative age
Summary
The mechanism by which words are retrieved from the mental lexicon for production remains a topic of considerable debate. Categorically related compared to unrelated contexts typically induce interference effects in picture naming paradigms. These interference effects can be relatively persistent, surviving multiple intervening unrelated trials. This paper is concerned with identifying the origin(s) of long-lasting semantic context effects in two well-established experimental word production paradigms: continuous and blocked cyclic picture naming. Findings with both paradigms have been integral to the development of rival theoretical accounts of spoken word production (Howard et al, 2006; Oppenheim et al, 2010; Belke, 2013). It is important to establish whether the two different manipulations of semantic context involve identical or different mechanisms
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