The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm

Abstract

The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm is a highly influential finding that has provided some of the most compelling support for word class constraints on lexical selection. However, methodological concerns called for a replication of the most convincing of those effects. Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Pechmann and Zerbst (2002; Experiment 4). Participants named pictures of objects in the context of noun and adverb distractors. Naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame contexts. A word class effect emerged in both bare noun and sentence frame naming conditions, suggesting a semantic origin of the effect. In Experiment 2, participants named objects in the context of noun and verb distractors whose word class relationship to the target and imageability were orthogonally manipulated. As before, naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame naming contexts. In both naming contexts, distractor imageability but not word class affected picture naming latencies. These findings confirm the sensitivity of the picture–word interference paradigm to distractor imageability and suggest the paradigm is not sensitive to distractor word class. The results undermine the use of the word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm as supportive of word class constraints during lexical selection.

Keywords:

• Lexical access
• Lexical selection
• Grammatical class
• Imageability
• Picture–word interference

Acknowledgments

N.J. was supported by a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government. B.Z.M. was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Grant. The research reported here was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant DC04542 to A.C.

Notes

¹Thus our design differed from that of Pechmann and Zerbst (2002, Experiment 4) in two ways: (a) Task order was counterbalanced; (b) SOA/block order and distractor to picture assignment were nested and not crossed.

²In another replication of this study (N = 24), we observed main effects of SOA and distractor type and an interaction between SOA and distractor type in sentence frame and bare noun naming conditions. The grammatical class effect was observed at SOAs –200, 0, and 100 ms (in both sentence frame and bare noun naming conditions, all tests two-tailed).

³In order to investigate whether our counterbalancing measure of the order of the sentence frame and bare noun naming conditions had an influence on the word class effect, we reanalysed the data with SOA, distractor type (nouns vs. adverbs), and task order as variables. In both the sentence frame and bare noun naming conditions, there was no main effect of task order (Fs  <  1), nor an interaction between task order and distractor type (all Fs  <  1). Thus, the word class effect was unaffected by the counterbalancing measure.

⁴The determiner was included in the preamble to avoid potential strategic behaviour and its negative effect on voice key measurements that could arise when every utterance starts with the same word (“the”).