My word! Interference from reading object names implies a role for competition during picture name retrieval

Abstract

A related word prime has been found to interfere with picture naming after unrelated intervening trials (word-to-picture interference). Recently, Stroop-type picture–word interference effects have been interpreted in terms of a postlexical response exclusion process rather than a competitive lexical selection process. An experiment is reported that examines whether word-to-picture effects could reflect response exclusion mechanisms and, more generally, strategic processing of the word prime. Forty-eight volunteer university students named aloud sequences of semantically related (and unrelated) word primes and picture targets, separated by two unrelated filler stimuli. On half of the trials, participants were asked to count backwards in threes from a random number presented immediately after naming the prime word. They were also given a surprise recall test at the end of the naming block. Results for naming times and errors indicated a main effect of relatedness; semantic interference effects were not dependent on the unfilled gap following the word prime trial and were also not tied to episodic recall of prime words. The data indicate that slowed picture naming times are more likely to emerge from processes intrinsic to word prime naming rather than controlled processing and do not readily fit the postlexical response exclusion account. The results are considered in relation to two recent accounts of interference over unrelated trials, which refer to some form of competition at, or prior to, lexical access.

Keywords:

• Words
• Pictures
• Naming
• Semantic interference
• Response exclusion
• Lexical selection
• Error learning

Acknowledgments

Elisa Cooper is now at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant 000-22-1593. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions in an earlier draft.

Notes

¹ An anonymous reviewer suggested an additional analysis evaluating the relatedness effect in relation to trials where the fillers were words versus pictures, as stronger effects for picture fillers might be consistent with a residual activation account of prime word effects. We have conducted this analysis, but filler type does not interact with the relatedness factor.

² In another experiment carried out in our laboratory, we used the same stimuli as those in the present experiment, but on the prime word trials, we asked participants to carry out a letter-search task on primes (cf. Tse & Neely, 2007). Despite similar levels of recall in the no-task conditions across studies, recall was reduced overall in the letter search task conditions, suggesting that floor effects are unlikely to be a problem in the current experiment.

³ There has been a recent interest (e.g., Oppenheim et al., 2010) in bringing together work on semantic interference in language production and episodic recall of semantic coordinates in the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm (e.g., Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). This is an important and relevant venture, though we note that these preliminary recall data do not provide any evidence that naming the picture target actually impaired recall of the related prime word relative to the control conditions.