Graded interference effects were tested in a naming task, in parallel for objects and actions. Participants named either object or action pictures presented in the context of other pictures (blocks) that were either semantically very similar, or somewhat semantically similar or semantically dissimilar. We found that naming latencies for both object and action words were modulated by the semantic similarity between the exemplars in each block, providing evidence in both domains of graded semantic effects. Graded Semantic Effects in Object and Action Naming Miller and Fellbaum (1991) wrote: "When psychologists think about the organization of lexical memory it is nearly always the organization of nouns that they have in mind" (p.214). Even more specifically, we may add, often it is nouns referring to objects that we have in mind. Although the object-noun domain is certainly relevant to studies of lexical memory, it only represents part of adults' lexical knowledge; theories and tools deve...

A series of three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of Adjective+Noun phrases in Dutch. Bilinguals (Dutch native speakers) were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an Adjective+Noun phrase in Dutch which included the translation of the noun. In two experiments, we blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender.We found that participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories; and faster when they were of the same grammatical gender than when they were of different gender. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed in order to both replicate the previous experiments and to test for interactions between the two effects. The results of the first two experiments were replicated, and crucially no interaction was found. These findings are compatible with models of lexical retrieval in production in which, first lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information are separable; second the flow of activation between the two is feedforward.

The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures out of a sequence of items from the same semantic category than from different categories. Participants named pictures blockwise either in the context of same- or mixedcategory items while the brain response was registered using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Fifteen out of 20 participants showed longer response latencies in the same-category compared to the mixed-category condition. Event-related MEG signals for the participants demonstrating the interference effect were submitted to a current source density (CSD) analysis. As a new approach, a principal component analysis was applied to decompose the grand average CSD distribution into spatial subcomponents (factors). The spatial factor indicating left temporal activity revealed significantly different activation for the same-category compared to the mixedcategory condition in the time window between 150 and 225 msec post picture onset. These findings indicate a major involvement of the left temporal cortex in the semantic interference effect. As this effect has been shown to take place at the level of lexical selection, the data suggest that the left temporal cortex supports processes of lexical retrieval during production. &

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Three different speech production paradigms are used to assess the hypothesis introduced by Kello, Plant, and MacWhinney (2000) according to...

This paper explores the role of semantic similarity in content selection and aggregation of expressions referring to sets. Similarity plays a role in ensuring that a referring expression corresponds to a coherent conceptual gestalt. On the basis of corpusbased and experimental evidence we propose an algorithm which (a) separates content selection and aggregation to avoid a combinatorial explosion; (b) uses similarity between entities to prioritise among search alternatives.

Following its introduction by Sapir (1933), the term “psychological reality ” has provoked intense reactions from within linguistics as well its neighboring disciplines. Discussions have been particularly heated since the rise of generative grammar, whose proponents made quite strong claims regarding the relationship of theoretical concepts from linguistics to the internal cognitive mechanisms underlying the acquisition and processing of sound patterns. For example, The Sound Pattern of English is asserted to be “a hypothesis concerning the actual internalized grammar of the speaker-hearer ” where grammar refers to “a system which is used in the production and interpretation of utterances (Chomsky and Halle, 1968: 4). ” Although this perspective is by no means universally adopted by phonologists, its dominance in linguistics since the mid-20 th century reflects a major conceptual shift from previous perspectives on the study of language. As noted by Anderson (1985:6; emphasis in original): “Traditionally, linguists have assumed that their concern was the study of languages, taken as (potentially unlimited) sets of possible sentences (or utterances, etc.) forming unitary and coherent systems. Gradually, however, the emphasis in research has shifted…to the properties of grammars, in the sense of

Factors determining semantic facilitation and interference

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00028 Picture-induced semantic interference reflects lexical competition during object naming