Do part–whole relations produce facilitation in the picture–word interference task?

Abstract

Three experiments used the picture–word interference task to evaluate competing models of lexical access in spoken word production. Both the presence of a part–whole relation and association between the target and the interfering word were manipulated. Part terms associated with targets produced facilitation at early stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; –300 ms in Experiment 1, –300 and –150 ms in Experiment 3), but not at SOA 0 ms. Otherwise, part terms tended to produce interference, with unassociated part terms producing a significant semantic interference effect (SIE) at SOA of 0 ms in Experiment 1, and a similar trend in Experiment 3. Experiment 2 replicated the materials and procedure of Costa, Alario, and Caramazza (2005, Experiment 2. On the categorical nature of the semantic interference effect in the picture–word interference paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12(1), 125–131), yet failed to find any semantic facilitation at SOA 0 ms. We propose that these findings are consistent with lexical competition accounts of SIE but difficult to explain in terms of the plausibility of the interfering words as responses to the target.

Keywords:

• Picture–word interference
• Lexical access
• Semantic interference
• Associative priming

We thank Dennis Bublitz, Arianna Miskin, Catherine Roca, and Paloma Wasserstein for assisting with data collection and tabulation.

The work was supported by a City University of New York (CUNY) Collaborative Research Award to Sailor and Brooks; National Institutes of Health (NIH) Score Grant [grant number S06 GM 008225].

Notes

1 The inclusion of excitatory connections between the word forms of associates was primarily developed to account for the effect of a distractor related to the nondepicted meaning of a target homophone, but Cutting and Ferreira (1999) did not limit these connections to the associates of homophones. For example, their Figure 4 (p. 334) depicts an excitatory connection between game and Frisbee despite the fact that neither word is a homophone. Thus, it seems reasonable to offer this account as a possible explanation of associated word forms more generally.