The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm

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.

[1]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[2]  W. Nelson Francis,et al.  FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH USAGE: LEXICON AND GRAMMAR , 1983 .

[3]  David P Vinson,et al.  Role of grammatical gender and semantics in German word production. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[4]  A. Caramazza.  How many levels of processing are there in lexical access , 1997 .

[5]  H. Schriefers.  Syntactic processes in the production of noun phrases , 1993 .

[6]  W. Levelt,et al.  Speaking: From Intention to Articulation , 1990 .

[7]  M. Garrett.  Levels of processing in sentence production , 1980 .

[8]  Curt Burgess,et al.  The effect of corpus size in predicting reaction time in a basic word recognition task: Moving on from Kučera and Francis , 1998 .

[9]  Edeltrud Marx,et al.  Gender Processing in Speech Production: Evidence from German Speech Errors , 1999 .

[10]  Thomas Pechmann,et al.  The time course of recovery for grammatical category information during lexical processing for syntactic construction. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[11]  Colin M. Macleod.  Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review. , 1991, Psychological bulletin.

[12]  W. Glaser,et al.  The time course of picture-word interference. , 1984, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[13]  S. Lupker.  The role of phonetic and orthographic similarity in picture-word interference. , 1982, Canadian journal of psychology.

[14]  Sieb G. Nooteboom,et al.  The tongue slips into patterns , 1969 .

[15]  Jean-Pierre Koenig,et al.  Part-of-speech persistence: The influence of part-of-speech information on lexical processes , 2007 .

[16]  S. Tipper,et al.  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 1948, Nature.

[17]  J. G. Snodgrass,et al.  A standardized set of 260 pictures: norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[18]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[19]  Stephen J. Lupker,et al.  The semantic nature of response competition in the picture-word interference task , 1979 .

[20]  W. La Heij,et al.  The gender-congruency effect in picture-word tasks , 1998 .

[21]  Albert Costa,et al.  Grammatical and nongrammatical contributions to closed-class word selection. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[22]  Bradford Z. Mahon,et al.  Lexical selection is not by competition: a reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[23]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Semantic and phonological codes interact in single word production. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[24]  M. F. Garrett,et al.  The Analysis of Sentence Production1 , 1975 .

[25]  Kenneth I Forster,et al.  DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy , 2003, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[26]  David P. Vinson,et al.  Naming action in Japanese: Effects of semantic similarity and grammatical class , 2008 .

[27]  Brian Butterworth,et al.  Speech and talk , 1980 .

[28]  R. Burchfield.  Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar. By W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera with the assistance of Andrew W. Mackie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1982. x + 561 , 1985 .

[29]  David P. Vinson,et al.  Semantic similarity and grammatical class in naming actions , 2005, Cognition.

[30]  D. Besner,et al.  Word Identification: Imageability, Semantics, and the Content-Functor Distinction , 1988 .

[31]  Thomas Pechmann,et al.  The activation of word class information during speech production. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[32]  Gary S Dell,et al.  Saying the right word at the right time: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic interference in sentence production , 2008, Language and cognitive processes.

[33]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  The representation of grammatical categories in the brain , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[34]  R. S. Berndt,et al.  Grammatical class and imageability in aphasic word production: their effects are independent , 2002, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[35]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Grammatical feature selection in noun phrase production: Evidence from German and Dutch , 2003 .

[36]  C Chiarello,et al.  Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English , 1999, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.