Persistent Semantic Interference in Picture Naming: Tests of an Incremental Learning Account

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary M. Oppenheim
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-853 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONIQUE CHAREST

ABSTRACTIn children and adults, naming an item sometimes interferes with later attempts to name other items. Adult speakers experience cumulative semantic interference, interpreted as the result of incremental learning. Studies to date have not examined whether incremental learning can also account for interference in children. This study examined context effects on picture naming in 3-year-old children, and investigated whether children, like adults, show interference that is semantically based and cumulative. Children named pictures from semantically homogeneous and mixed sets. Response latency, accuracy, and repetition errors were recorded. The results demonstrated a progressive slowing of responses in the semantically homogeneous condition that was greater than that observed for the mixed condition. There were no significant effects for accuracy. Repetition errors, although infrequent, patterned similarly to previous reports for adults. The results indicate that preschool-aged children experience cumulative semantic interference in naming, and suggest that incremental learning may account for interference effects across development.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wöhner ◽  
Andreas Mädebach ◽  
Jörg D. Jescheniak

Semantic context effects obtained in naming tasks have been most influential in devising and evaluating models of word production. We re-investigated this effect in the frequently used blocked-cyclic naming task in which stimuli are presented repeatedly either sorted by semantic category (homogeneous context) or intermixed (heterogeneous context). Previous blocked-cyclic naming studies have shown slower picture naming responses in the homogeneous context. Our study compared this context effect in two task versions, picture naming and sound naming. Target words were identical across task versions (e.g., participants responded with the word “dog” to either the picture of that animal or to the sound [barking] produced by it). We found semantic interference in the homogeneous context also with sounds and the effect was substantially larger than with pictures (Experiments 1 and 2). This difference is unlikely to result from extended perceptual processing of sounds as compared to pictures (Experiments 3 and 4) or from stronger links between pictures and object names than between sounds and object names (Experiment 5). Overall, our results show that semantic context effects in blocked-cyclic naming generalize to stimulus types other than pictures and – in part – also reflect pre-lexical processes that depend on the nature of the stimuli used for eliciting the naming responses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (7) ◽  
pp. 1667-1681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Lorenz ◽  
Pienie Zwitserlood ◽  
Stefanie Regel ◽  
Rasha Abdel Rahman

This study investigated effects of healthy ageing and of non-verbal attentional control on speech production. Young and older speakers participated in a picture-word interference (PWI) task with compound targets. To increase the processing load, the two pictures of the compounds’ constituents were presented side-by-side for spoken naming (e.g., a picture of a sun + a picture of a flower to be named with sunflower). Written distractors either corresponded to the first or second constituent ( sun or flower → sunflower), or were semantically related either to the first constituent of the target ( moon → sunflower) or to the second constituent/whole word ( tulip → sunflower). Morpho-phonological facilitation was obtained for both constituents, whereas semantic interference was restricted to first-constituent-related semantic distractors. Furthermore, a trend towards facilitation was obtained for distractors that were semantically related to the whole word. Older speakers were slower and produced more errors than young speakers. While morphological effects of first-constituent distractors were stronger for the elderly, the semantic effects were not affected by age. Non-verbal attentional control processes, measured in the Simon task, significantly contributed to morpho-phonological priming in the elderly, but they did not affect semantic interference or semantic facilitation. With a picture naming task that increases the semantic and lexical processing load, we corroborate earlier evidence that word-finding difficulties in the elderly result from deficient phonological encoding, whereas lexical-semantic and morpho-phonological representations remain stable with age.


2019 ◽  
Vol 195 ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Melanie Vitkovitch ◽  
Tahira Batool Ghadiri ◽  
Falis Hersi

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 1909-1916 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Mädebach ◽  
Marie-Luise Kieseler ◽  
Jörg D. Jescheniak

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Monique CHAREST ◽  
Tieghan BAIRD

Abstract Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in school-aged children. In Study 1, children named a series of contiguous, semantically related pictures. The results revealed no cumulative interference effects. Study 2 utilized an approach more closely aligned with adult methods, incorporating intervening, unrelated items intermixed with semantically related items within a continuous list. Study 2 showed a linear increase in reaction time as a function of ordinal position within semantic sets. These findings demonstrate cumulative semantic interference effects in young, school-aged children that are consistent with experience-driven changes in the connections that underlie lexical access. They invite further investigation of how children's lexical representation and processing are shaped by speaking experiences.


2015 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitória Piai ◽  
Ardi Roelofs ◽  
Herbert Schriefers

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (12) ◽  
pp. 2562-2570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna S Gauvin ◽  
Magdalena K Jonen ◽  
Jessica Choi ◽  
Katie McMahon ◽  
Greig I de Zubicaray

Over the past 40 years, researchers have assumed that semantic interference effects in picture naming reflect competition among lexical candidates during retrieval. In this study, we examined the role of the familiarisation phase in which participants are shown the target pictures and required to rehearse the appropriate names before the picture–word interference (PWI) paradigm is performed. A previous study reported that omitting the familiarisation phase reversed the polarity of the semantic effect to facilitation. In two experiments using between- and within-participants design, respectively, we compared PWI performance with and without familiarisation while using matched stimuli and task parameters. Overall, the results showed the typical semantic interference effect following familiarisation. However, in both experiments, naming latencies did not differ significantly between related and unrelated distractors when familiarisation was omitted. The current findings suggest that familiarisation plays an important role in determining semantic interference in PWI, most likely via raising lexical competitor activation by priming links between targets and related concepts. We also discuss broader implications of our findings with respect to the replicability of reported semantic facilitation effects in PWI.


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