A cautionary note on the studies using the picture-word interference paradigm: the unwelcome consequences of the random use of "in/animates"

Abstract

The picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm allows us to delve into the process of lexical access in language production with great precision. It creates situations of interference between target pictures and superimposed distractor words that participants must consciously ignore to name the pictures. Yet, although the PWI paradigm has offered numerous insights at all levels of lexical representation, in this work we expose an extended lack of control regarding the variable animacy. Animacy has been shown to have a great impact on cognition, especially when it comes to the mechanisms of attention, which are highly biased toward animate entities to the detriment of inanimate objects. Furthermore, animate nouns have been shown to be semantically richer and prioritized during lexical access, with effects observable in multiple psycholinguistic tasks. Indeed, not only does the performance on a PWI task directly depend on the different stages of lexical access to nouns, but also attention has a fundamental role in it, as participants must focus on targets and ignore interfering distractors. We conducted a systematic review with the terms "picture-word interference paradigm" and "animacy" in the databases PsycInfo and Psychology Database. The search revealed that only 12 from a total of 193 PWI studies controlled for animacy, and only one considered it as a factor in the design. The remaining studies included animate and inanimate stimuli in their materials randomly, sometimes in a very disproportionate amount across conditions. We speculate about the possible impact of this uncontrolled variable mixing on many types of effects within the framework of multiple theories, namely the Animate Monitoring Hypothesis, the WEAVER++ model, and the Independent Network Model in an attempt to fuel the theoretical debate on this issue as well as the empirical research to turn speculations into knowledge.

Keywords: Animate Monitoring Hypotheiss; animacy; animate nouns; inanimate nouns; language production; lexical access; picture-word interference paradigm.

Figure 1

Example of a typical PWI task. In this example, distractors are presented written over the targets, rather than orally. Presentation of both targets and distractors is simultaneous, but different stimulus onset asynchronies have been tested in which the distractor can be presented either before or after the target (and, differently from a prime word, it is maintained on the screen along with the target). In the condition to the left, there is a semantic relationship between target “table” and distractor “chair”; in the condition to the right, there is phonological overlap between target “table” and distractor “maple”. The image of a table was taken from the International Picture Naming Project (IPNP) database (Szekely et al., 2004).

Figure 2

Simplified structure of lexical access during the production of the noun “table”. Semantic features with lighter background at the conceptual level are meant to represent other features that are not related to “TABLE” and hence are not active. The same applies to lighter features at the grammatical-syntactic level. Arrows represent the flowing of activation. Sf, Semantic Feature; N, Noun; Adj, Adjective; S, Singular; PL, Plural. Based on the architecture proposed by WEAVER++. Adapted from Levelt et al. (1999).

Figure 3

Structure of the search according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) flowchart of the literature search (Moher et al., 2009).