Feature overlap slows lexical selection: Evidence from the picture–word interference paradigm

How does the presence of a categorically related word influence picture naming latencies? In order to test competitive and noncompetitive accounts of lexical selection in spoken word production, we employed the picture–word interference (PWI) paradigm to investigate how conceptual feature overlap influences naming latencies when distractors are category coordinates of the target picture. Mahon et al. (2007. Lexical selection is not by competition: A reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(3), 503–535. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.33.3.503) reported that semantically close distractors (e.g., zebra) facilitated target picture naming latencies (e.g., HORSE) compared to far distractors (e.g., whale). We failed to replicate a facilitation effect for within-category close versus far target–distractor pairings using near-identical materials based on feature production norms, instead obtaining reliably larger interference effects (Experiments 1 and 2). The interference effect did not show a monotonic increase across multiple levels of within-category semantic distance, although there was evidence of a linear trend when unrelated distractors were included in analyses (Experiment 2). Our results show that semantic interference in PWI is greater for semantically close than for far category coordinate relations, reflecting the extent of conceptual feature overlap between target and distractor. These findings are consistent with the assumptions of prominent competitive lexical selection models of speech production.     

Is attention needed for word identification? Evidence from the Stroop paradigm

One of the most robust findings in attention research is that the time to name a color is lengthened markedly in the presence of an irrelevant word that spells a different color name: the Stroop effect. The Stroop effect is found even when the word is physically separated from the color, apparently indicating that words can be read outside the focus of spatial attention. The present study critically evaluated this claim. We employed several stringent measures within a Stroop paradigm to prevent participants from attending to the irrelevant words (e.g., limiting exposure duration to prevent attention capture). Nonetheless, residual Stroop effects were obtained for both color words and semantic associates (e.g., sky to blue). These data suggest that lexical processing can sometimes occur outside the focus of spatial attention.     

A late locus of the distractor frequency effect in picture–word interference: Evidence from event-related potentials

In this study, we investigated how people deal with irrelevant contextual information during speech production. Two main models have been proposed. WEAVER++ assumes that irrelevant information is removed from the production system by an early blocking mechanism. On the other hand, the response exclusion hypothesis assumes a blocking mechanism that operates late, after lexical selection has finished. To delineate between these models, we focused on the distractor frequency effect (i.e., longer picture naming latencies in the context of low-frequency compared to high-frequency words) and measured ERPs concurrently. Behaviorally, the distractor frequency effect was replicated. In the ERPs, three effects were found. One effect occurred very early and is interpreted as an effect of low-level visual feature processing. The two other effects occurred after lexical access and are thus in line with the response exclusion hypothesis.     

Assessing the role of orthography in speech perception and production: Evidence from picture–word interference tasks

The effects of orthographic and phonological relatedness between distractor word and object name in a picture–word interference task were investigated. In Experiment 1 distractors were presented visually, and consistent with previous findings, priming effects arising from phonological overlap were modulated by the presence or absence of orthographic similarity between distractor and picture name. This pattern is interpreted as providing evidence for cascaded processing in visual word recognition. In Experiment 2 distractors were presented auditorily, and here priming was not affected by orthographic match or mismatch. These findings provide no evidence for orthographic effects in speech perception and production, contrary to a number of previous reports.     

Why is number word learning hard? Evidence from bilingual learners

Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn the meanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated this developmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relative contributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the construction of numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specific words onto these concepts. We found that children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in each language, indicating that observed delays in learning these words are attributable to difficulties in mapping words to concepts. In contrast, children generally learned to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in their two languages, suggesting that the difficulty in learning to count is not tied to a specific language. We also replicated previous studies that found that children learn the counting procedure before they learn its logic – i.e., that for any natural number, n, the successor of n in the count list denotes the cardinality n + 1. Consistent with past studies, we found that children’s knowledge of successors is first acquired incrementally. In bilinguals, we found that this knowledge exhibits item-specific transfer between languages, suggesting that the logic of the positive integers may not be stored in a language-specific format. We conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number words are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned in a format that is independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development.     

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 Pechmann, T. and Zerbst, D. 2002. The activation of word class information during speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28: 233–243. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; 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.     

Stroop and picture—word interference are two sides of the same coin

This article presents a cognitive model that reconciles a surprising observation in the picture—word interference (PWI) paradigm with the general notion that PWI is a form of Stroop interference. Dell’Acqua, Job, Peressotti, and Pascali (2007) assessed PWI using a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, and concluded that the locus of interference in PWI is during the perceptual encoding stage. Stroop interference, on the other hand, is generally attributed to response selection. Based on these findings it was argued that PWI is not a Stroop effect. The present article discusses an alternative interpretation of these results. We assume that both effects are caused by the same interference mechanism, but that the processing speed associated with the different stimuli (colors vs. words) accounts for the previously reported differences. We support this argument by presenting a single computational model that accounts for both PWI and Stroop phenomena in single task and PRP settings.     

Inhibition of non-target languages in multilingual word production: Evidence from Uighur–Chinese–English trilinguals

The present study examined the hypothesis whether non-target languages are inhibited during multilingual language production by examining the n-2 language repetition cost. In two experiments, Uighur–Chinese–English trilinguals named Arabic digits in one of their three languages according to a visually presented cue. Significant n-2 repetition costs were obtained in both experiments, which indicate that inhibition exists during multilingual word production. In addition, in Experiment 1, it was also found that the n-2 repetition cost was reduced when cues were highly compatible with the task, which means non-target languages are less inhibited. In Experiment 2, the n-2 repetition cost was increased at a shorter CSI. Taken together, these results indicate that inhibition of non-target languages occurs during multilingual language production, and that efficiency of establishing the target language task schema has an effect on the inhibitory control process.     

A single bout of meditation biases cognitive control but not attentional focusing: Evidence from the global–local task

Recent studies show that a single bout of meditation can impact information processing. We were interested to see whether this impact extends to attentional focusing and the top-down control over irrelevant information. Healthy adults underwent brief single bouts of either focused attention meditation (FAM), which is assumed to increase top-down control, or open monitoring meditation (OMM), which is assumed to weaken top-down control, before performing a global–local task. While the size of the global-precedence effect (reflecting attentional focusing) was unaffected by type of meditation, the congruency effect (indicating the failure to suppress task-irrelevant information) was considerably larger after OMM than after FAM. Our findings suggest that engaging in particular kinds of meditation creates particular cognitive-control states that bias the individual processing style toward either goal-persistence or cognitive flexibility.     

To what extent do we process the nondominant object in a morphed figure? Evidence from a picture–word interference task

Since the 1970s, the Heuristics and Biases Program in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people do not reason correctly about conditional probability problems. In the 1990s, however, evolutionary psychologists discovered that if the same problems are presented in a different way, people's performance greatly improves. Two explanations have been offered to account for this facilitation effect: the natural frequency hypothesis and the nested-set hypothesis. The empirical evidence on this debate is mixed. We review the literature pointing out some methodological issues that we take into account in our own present experiments. We interpret our results as suggesting that when the mentioned methodological problems are tackled, the evidence seems to favour the natural frequency hypothesis and to go against the nested-set hypothesis.     

Interlinguistic conflict: Word–word Stroop with first and second language colour words

The congruency (or Stroop) effect is a standard observation of slower and less accurate colour identification to incongruent trials (e.g. “red” in green) relative to congruent trials (e.g. “red” in red). This effect has been observed in a word–word variant of the task, when both the distracter (e.g. “red”) and target (e.g. “green”) are colour words. The Stroop task has also been used to study the congruency effect between two languages in bilinguals. The typical finding is that the congruency effect for L1 words is larger than that for L2 words. For the first time, the present report aims to extend this finding to a word–word variant of the bilingual Stroop task. In two experiments, French monolinguals performed a bilingual word–word Stroop task in which target word language, language match, and congruency between the distracter and target were manipulated. The critical manipulation across two experiments concerned the target language. In Experiment 1, target language was manipulated between groups, with either French (L1) or English (L2) target colour words. In Experiment 2, target words from both languages were intermixed. In both experiments, the congruency effect was larger when the distracter and target were from the same language (language match) than when they were from different languages (language mismatch). Our findings suggested that this congruency effect mostly depends on the language match between the distracter and target, rather than on a target language. It also did not seem to matter whether the language-mismatching distracter was or was not a potential response alternative. Semantic activation of languages in bilinguals and its implications on target identification are discussed.

     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.     

Emotional facilitation effect in the picture–word interference task: An ERP study

In this paper, we aimed to verify the emotional facilitation effect in the picture–word interference task using event-related potentials. Twenty-one healthy subjects were asked to categorize the emotional valences of pictures accompanied by emotionally congruent, either centrally or laterally positioned Chinese words. For both the foveal and lateral word presentations, the reaction times were faster compared to the picture-only presentation. Compared to the picture-only presentation, P200 amplitude increased under the foveal word presentation condition and decreased under the lateral word presentation condition, indicating that more attentional resources were required when an accompanying word was in the center of a picture than when the word was in the lateral position. Latency of P300 was shorter in response to picture–word stimuli irrespective of word position, indicating that an emotionally congruent word facilitated the emotional processing of the target picture, which verified the emotional facilitation effect and was consistent with the results in psychology. The late positive component was more positive when the picture–word stimuli were more positive, which reflected the feature of positivity offset. The findings suggest that the time window for an emotional facilitation effect may be limited to processing aspects associated with P300 (i.e., affective evaluation).     

Perceptual strength is different from sensorimotor strength: Evidence from the centre–periphery asymmetry in masked priming

Near-threshold prime stimuli can facilitate or hinder responses to target stimuli, creating either a positive compatibility effect (PCE) or a negative compatibility effect (NCE). An asymmetry has been reported between primes presented in near periphery, which produced a PCE, and foveal primes, which produced an NCE under comparable conditions. This asymmetry has been attributed to the difference in retinal sensitivity, but it remains unclear whether this means that equating discrimination performance for primes in fovea and periphery, in order to account for differences in perceptual sensitivity, would make the priming effects the same. Wider work indicates that perceptual ability can dissociate from visuomotor effects, predicting that equating perceptual ability for fovea and periphery would not equate priming. We tested these opposite possibilities by matching discrimination performance for masked Gabor patches in fovea and near periphery (6°) and using these as primes in a masked priming paradigm expected to elicit NCEs. We found the asymmetry remained: NCE for fovea and PCE for periphery. We replicated this with both blocked and randomized procedures to check for attentional effects. We conclude that equating perceptual strength (discriminability) of stimuli does not equate their sensorimotor impact due to differences in the relative importance of different visual pathways and differing temporal dynamics in perceptual and sensorimotor processes.     

Speed of processing explains the picture–word asymmetry in conditional naming

In this study, we investigated picture (Experiments 1 and 2) and word (Experiments 3 and 4) processing using different tasks. In Experiments 1 and 3, easy and difficult conditional naming tasks were compared to a free naming task. In Experiments 2 and 4, easy and difficult conditional naming tasks were compared to easy and difficult manual forced-choice semantic decision tasks. For pictures, we showed that a difficult semantic categorization determined a cost for the conditional naming with respect to the free naming (Experiment 1). Also, we found that the difference in RTs between the easy and difficult conditional naming tasks was much smaller than the difference between the easy and difficult forced-choice semantic decision tasks (Experiment 2). For words, results showed that free reading was faster than easy conditional reading, which in turn was faster than difficult conditional reading (Experiment 3). An analogous pattern of results was obtained when the easy and difficult conditional reading tasks were compared to the easy and difficult forced-choice semantic decision tasks (Experiment 4). Globally, the results showed that whether a cost is observed or not depends upon the relative timing of the classification and name retrieval processes. A theoretical framework has been proposed.     

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

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 Costa, A., Alario, F.-X., & Caramazza, A. (2005). On the categorical nature of the semantic interference effect in the picture-word interference paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12(1), 125–131. doi:10.3758/BF03196357.2005-04938-012[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 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.     

How long-lasting is the post-conflict slowing after incongruent trials? Evidence from the Stroop,Simon, and flanker tasks

The purpose of the present study was to determine how long-lasting the post-conflict slowing following incongruent stimuli is. In previous research, incongruent stimuli have been used to induce a conflict because they have relevant features for two different response alternatives. So far, the post-conflict slowing following incongruent stimuli has mainly been assessed up to one trial. In the first two experiments, we assessed the persistence of the post-conflict slowing across several trials. To this end, we presented a few incongruent stimuli among non-conflict stimuli. The results showed a consistent slowing for the first few trials immediately following the incongruent trials. In addition, a sporadic slowing was still found on later trials. In two subsequent experiments, we investigated to what extent the infrequency of incongruent trials — rather than their conflict — induced this slowing. To determine this, we used the same design as in the first two experiments, but we presented non-conflict stimuli as infrequent stimuli. The results showed a slowing on one subsequent trial, ruling out the possibility that the post-conflict slowing following incongruent trials was only caused by infrequency. Together, the findings of the present study indicate that the conflict induced by incongruent trials can have a longer lasting impact on subsequent trials than previously thought.     

Centre–surround inhibition is a general aspect of famous-person recognition: Evidence from negative semantic priming from clearly visible primes

A centre–surround attentional mechanism was proposed by Carr and Dagenbach (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 341–350, 1990) to account for their observations of negative semantic priming from hard-to-perceive primes. Their mechanism cannot account for the observation of negative semantic priming when primes are clearly visible. Three experiments (Ns = 30, 46, and 30) used a familiarity decision with names of famous people, preceded by a prime name with the same occupation as the target or with a different occupation. Negative semantic priming was observed at a 150- or 200-ms SOA, with positive priming at shorter (50-ms) and longer (1,000-ms) SOAs. In Experiment 3, we verified that the primes were easily recognisable in the priming task at an SOA that yielded negative semantic priming, which cannot be predicted by the original centre–surround mechanism. A modified version is proposed that explains transiently negative semantic priming by proposing that centre–surround inhibition is a normal, automatically invoked aspect of the semantic processing of visually presented famous names.