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Transforming semantic interference into facilitation in a picture–word interference task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2015

QINGFANG ZHANG ,
CHEN FENG ,
XUEBING ZHU  and
CHENG WANG
QINGFANG ZHANG*
Affiliation:
Renmin University of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences
CHEN FENG
Affiliation:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
XUEBING ZHU
Affiliation:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
CHENG WANG
Affiliation:
Chinese Academy of Sciences
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Qingfang Zhang, Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100872, China. E-mail: qingfang.zhang@ruc.edu.cn
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Abstract

A number of studies that observed semantic facilitation in a picture–word interference task questioned the hypothesis that lexical selection during speech production is a competitive process. Semantic facilitation effects are typically observed when context words and target names do not belong to the same semantic category level. In the experiments reported in this article, we used a picture–word interference task with basic-level context words and basic-level naming (i.e., the context word is dog, and the target name is cat) to investigate semantic context effects. We observed a reversal of semantic context effect: context words that induce semantic interference when stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) are –100 and 0 ms and induce semantic facilitation at large negative SOA values (from –1000 to –400 ms, in steps of 200 ms). At the empirical level, our data suggest that manipulating SOA can reverse the polarity of the semantic context effect. Our analysis demonstrates that the conceptual selection model provides the most straightforward way to account for the reported polarity shift and the different SOA ranges covered by the semantic interference effect and the semantic facilitation effect.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 1025 - 1049
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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