Cumulative and non-cumulative semantic interference in object naming: Evidence from blocked and continuous manipulations of semantic context

Abstract

Experiments involving blocked and continuous manipulations of the semantic naming context demonstrate that, when speakers name several taxonomically related objects in close succession, they display persistent interference effects. A review of studies using the blocked paradigm shows that, unlike the continuous paradigm, it typically does not induce cumulative interference effects in healthy speakers. This contrasts with the simulation results obtained from a model of semantic context effects recently put forward by Oppenheim and colleagues [Oppenheim, G. M., Dell, G. S., & Schwartz, M. F. (2010). The dark side of incremental learning: A model of cumulative semantic interference during lexical access in speech production. Cognition, 114, 227--262], which generates cumulative effects in both paradigms. We propose that the effects are non-cumulative in the blocked paradigm, because it allows participants to bias top-down the levels of activation of lexical-semantic representations, thereby curtailing the accumulating interference. Indeed, prior research has shown that the interference effects in the blocked paradigm are exacerbated when participants carry out a concurrent digit-retention task, loading on working memory and reducing their capacity to exert a top-down bias. In Experiment 1, combining the continuous paradigm with a digit-retention task, we demonstrate that this does not exacerbate cumulative context effects, corroborating the selective role of working memory and the associated top-down biasing mechanism in the blocked paradigm. A review of neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies demonstrates that left inferior frontal regions may play a critical role in controlling semantic interference top-down. We discuss the implications of these findings for language production research and for models of lexical-semantic encoding.

Keywords:

• Language production
• Lexical retrieval
• Semantic interference

Notes

¹ We are grateful to Rasha Abdel Rahman for providing the relevant data for the categorically related and unrelated object sets tested in Experiments 1 and 2 reported in Abdel Rahman and Melinger (2007, 2011).

² The model's architecture is based on a hypothetical unification of the featural and unitary semantic space (FUSS) model of conceptual representations (Vigliocco, Vinson, Lewis, & Garrett, 2004) and non-decompositional models of lexical access in language production (Levelt et al., 1999; Schade, 1999; see Belke, 2008b and Belke, 2012, for details). The links between conceptual features and lexical concepts (dashed lines) carry variable weights, which were established in Vigliocco et al. (2004).

³ One might argue that the interaction of position and WM-load did not reach significance because the effect of WM-load was weak in the by-participants analyses in the first place. However, the first author has recently replicated the present pattern of results in an experiment designed to assess the WM-load effect across different tasks, including object naming, word naming, and semantic classification, yielding a significant main effect of WM-load on object naming in the by-participants and the by-categories analyses and no interaction with position in either analysis (Belke, 2012).