Distributional properties of semantic interference in picture naming: Bayesian meta-analyses

TL;DR

This study uses Bayesian meta-analyses to explore how semantic interference affects picture naming times, revealing its distributional properties and challenging the role of inhibition in the effect.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the semantic interference effect's distributional properties and questions the necessity of inhibition in explaining the effect.

Findings

Semantic interference is present throughout the reaction time distribution.

The interference effect increases across the reaction time distribution.

Correlation between mean interference and tail change does not necessarily imply inhibition.

Abstract

Studies of word production often make use of picture naming tasks, including the picture word interference task. In this task, participants name pictures with superimposed distractor words. They typically need more time to name pictures when the distractor word is semantically related to the picture than when it is unrelated (the semantic interference effect). The present study examines the distributional properties of this effect in a series of Bayesian meta-analyses. Meta-analytic estimates of the semantic interference effect first show that the effect is present throughout the reaction time distribution and that it increases throughout the distribution. Second, we find a correlation between a participant's mean semantic interference effect and the change in the effect in the tail of the reaction time distribution, which has been argued to reflect the involvement of selective inhibition in the naming task. Finally, we show with simulated data that this correlation emerges even when no inhibition is used to generate the data, which suggests that inhibition is not needed to explain this relationship.