Neighing dogs and ringing cars - studies on lexical processing during language production with a novel picture-sound interference paradigm

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In everyday life we are constantly surrounded by naturally occurring sounds. Many of these sounds can be easily identified and are strongly associated with specific sources. For instance, when we hear a bark, we are automatically reminded of the animal producing that sound and we would have no problem naming it as “dog”. In other words, many natural sounds allow for a fast and unambiguous activation of corresponding semantic and lexical representations. In this research project this association between natural sounds and semantic representations is used to investigate lexical processes in language production. In particular the project aims to help answer the much debated question of whether lexical selection, that is, our ability to swiftly select the right word among a number of alternatives, is a competitive process or not. The ongoing debate about the nature of lexical selection is highly focused on evidence from the picture-word interference paradigm. In this task participants name pictures while ignoring distractor words. A key finding is that picture naming is slower if the distractor word is semantically related to the picture (e.g., picture: dog, word: horse) compared to an unrelated distractor word (e.g., word: car). This semantic interference effect is often regarded as evidence for competitive lexical selection. However, this interpretation has been strongly disputed in recent years and an alternative explanation of the effect within a framework of non-competitive lexical selection has been proposed. The main goal of this research project is to test predictions of competitive and non-competitive accounts of lexical selection by investigating cross-modal semantic interaction in processing natural sounds and pictures. In the first phase of the project naturals sounds were used as distractor stimuli (in picture naming tasks) and as target stimuli (in sound naming and sound categorization tasks). Main result of the first phase of the project are observations of semantic interference effects in picture naming with distractor sound) and sound naming with distractor pictures. These findings show that semantic interference is not restricted to distractor words. This supports the hypothesis that semantic interference effects reflect a competitive lexical selection mechanism in speech production. In the second phase of the project we aim to elucidate whether target and distractor modality (respectively their combination) modulate semantic interference effects by directly comparing uni-modal and cross-modal interference tasks. Furthermore, we will investigate whether cross-modal semantic interference between sounds and pictures generalizes to sequential naming tasks. This will provide novel insights into the incremental learning mechanisms shaping language production at the interface of conceptual and lexical representations.