Now you see it ... and now again: semantic interference reflects lexical competition in speech production with and without articulation

Abstract

Semantic interference effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm have long been assumed to reflect competitive mechanisms during lexical selection, a core component of the speech production system. However, recent observations of facilitative effects have cast doubt on the usefulness of the paradigm for investigating lexicalization, and on the existence of lexical competition in general. An alternative proposal suggests that lexical selection is not by competition, and that interference effects reflect articulatory processes outside the lexical system. Here, we contrast these theoretical alternatives with semantic distractor effects in the PWI paradigm. In two tasks, pictures were either overtly named or the names were manually classified. Interference effects of comparable magnitude were observed in both response modalities, regardless of whether the names were articulated or not. This finding supports lexical competition models and suggests that the articulators are not the source of interference in the PWI paradigm. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.