Pragmatic constraints do not prevent the co-activation of alternative names: evidence from sequential naming tasks with one and two speakers

ABSTRACT

We investigated whether the phonological co-activation of alternative names in picture naming (e.g. “fish” for target “shark”) is reduced by contextual constraints which render them inappropriate. In the constraining context, the target naming response was preceded by a naming response to an object from the same category (e.g. an eel) which remained visible during target naming. Therefore, use of the alternative target name “fish” would result (a) in an ambiguous response because of the visual context and (b) in a pragmatically odd response because of the previous naming response. In Experiment 1 the context pictures were named by the participants themselves and in Experiment 2 by a communication partner. In both experiments, interference from distractor words phonologically related (“finger”) versus unrelated (“book”) to the alternative name was observed regardless of context. This finding indicates limited flexibility in lexical activation during speech planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech production
• lexical access
• picture-word interference
• context effects
• joint naming

Acknowledgments

Our research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG JE229/11-1). Andreas Mädebach was supported by a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral grant (2017 BP 00180) of the Catalan Government during the writing of this manuscript. We thank Tobias Struck and Ismail Ayoub for assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data and analysis scripts to reproduce the results presented in this article are openly available via the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/gh7n6/.

Notes

1 We used a slightly different assignment of the unrelated distractors.

2 The response-exclusion account was proposed to explain semantic interference (Finkbeiner & Caramazza, 2006; Mahon et al., 2007) and distractor frequency effects (Dhooge & Hartsuiker, 2010). To the best of our knowledge no explicit claims have been made regarding phonological (interference) effects. Extending the response-exclusion account to phonological effects appears to be not trivial. For instance, it is unclear how this account would simultaneously explain phonological facilitation and phonological interference. We also want to note that the response exclusion account has been repeatedly criticised on empirical and theoretical grounds and it seems that it cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for many relevant findings in the literature (e.g. Aristei & Abdel Rahman, 2013; Hutson, Damian, & Spalek, 2013; Jescheniak, Matushanskaya, Mädebach, & Müller, 2014; Mädebach, Wöhner, Kieseler, & Jescheniak, 2017; Mädebach, Oppermann, Hantsch, Curda, & Jescheniak, 2011; Mulatti & Coltheart, 2012; Roelofs, Piai, & Schriefers, 2013; Rose, Aristei, Melinger, & Abdel Rahman, 2019; Starreveld, La Heij, & Verdonschot, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

Our research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG JE229/11-1). Andreas Mädebach was supported by a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral grant (2017 BP 00180) by the AGAUR of the Catalan Government during the writing of this manuscript.