Abstract
Lexical cohort size is known to play an important role in the magnitude of semantic interference during picture naming in continuous and blocking naming tasks. Nevertheless, whether and how lexical cohort size influences semantic context effects in a picture–word interference (PWI) task remains unclear. To address this issue, participants were required to name pictures, which were paired with both semantically related and unrelated distractors, from both large and small lexical cohorts while electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded. Behavior results showed a semantic interference effect but no interaction between semantic relatedness and lexical cohort size in naming latencies. ERPs and correlation analyses revealed that semantic interference effects occurred at the lexical level in the time windows of 200–400 and 400–600 ms, and lexical cohort size effects occurred at the conceptual level in the time window of 100–200 ms and at the lexical level in the time windows of 200–400 ms. Critically, no interaction between two variables was found, reflecting that lexical cohort size is independent of semantic interference for categorical relations in the PWI. sLORETA results found stronger brain activations for large lexical cohorts at the left superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus in the time interval of 250–300 ms, which may relate to lexical selection and self-monitoring. Our findings provide evidence for the swinging lexical network rather than the response exclusion hypothesis in spoken production.
Highlights
A recent debate in language production literature analyzes how speakers retrieve words from the mental lexicon
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of lexical cohort size on the magnitude of semantic context effects during picture naming using a picture–word interference (PWI) task combined with EEG and standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography techniques
The repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the averaged amplitudes was conducted separately for four consecutive time windows; the variables semantic relatedness and lexical cohort size were factorially crossed, and it included the variables of regions of interest (ROIs) and repetition
Summary
A recent debate in language production literature analyzes how speakers retrieve words from the mental lexicon. The picture–word interference (hereafter PWI) paradigm, a variant of the Stroop task, has been broadly used to investigate the word retrievals within the field of speech production (Mahon et al, 2007; Dell’Acqua et al, 2010; Zhu et al, 2015, 2016; Wong et al, 2017). In this paradigm, speakers are instructed to name pictures while ignoring written distractor words superimposed onto the pictures. Semantic facilitation has been envisaged as the semantic priming of the target concept (Finkbeiner and Caramazza, 2006; Mahon et al, 2007; Abdel Rahman and Melinger, 2009a,b), while semantic interference reflects the lexical selection competition among co-activated semantically related lexical representations during lemma retrieval (Roelofs, 1992, 2018; Starreveld and La Heij, 1996; Levelt et al, 1999; Abdel Rahman and Melinger, 2009a,b) or arises from the response exclusion difficulty given that semantically related distractors are more difficult to exclude from the response buffer than unrelated ones due to response relevance (Finkbeiner and Caramazza, 2006; Mahon et al, 2007)
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