Morphological effects on speech production: Evidence from picture naming

Abstract

The influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names was investigated in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. In the first variant, distractor words were presented concurrently with the pictures, which had to be named. Semantic distractors produced the expected interference. Morphological and phonological distractors both resulted in facilitation, but the size of the effect was much larger for morphological distractors. In a second variant, distractors and pictures were separated by a lag of 7–10 intervening trials. Picture naming was again facilitated by morphological distractors, but no effects were found for phonological and semantic distractors. Distractors from different morphological classes were investigated in the last experiment, again with lags between distractors and pictures. Although these distractors shared a free morpheme with the picture name, they differed from the picture at the conceptual and lemma level. Equal amounts of facilitation were obtained for all distractor types, suggesting that effects originate at a level of shared morphemes.