In 2 experiments participants named pictures of common objects with superimposed distractor words. In one naming condition, the pictures and words were presented simultaneously on every trial, and participants produced the target response immediately. In the other naming condition, the presentation of the picture preceded the presentation of the distractor by 1,000 ms, and participants delayed production of their naming response until distractor word presentation. Within each naming condition, the distractor words were either semantic category coordinates of the target pictures or unrelated. Orthogonal to this manipulation of semantic relatedness, the frequency of the pictures' names was manipulated. The authors observed semantic interference effects in both the immediate and delayed naming conditions but a frequency effect only in the immediate naming condition. These data indicate that semantic interference can be observed when target picture naming latencies do not reflect the bottleneck at the level of lexical selection. In the context of other findings from the picture-word interference paradigm, the authors interpret these data as supporting the view that the semantic interference effect arises at a postlexical level of processing.Keywords semantic interference effect; lexical selection by competition; picture-word interference; delayed naming; response exclusion hypothesis A central question in language production research concerns the dynamical principles that govern the mechanism responsible for retrieving words from the mental lexicon. A widespread assumption in language production models is that lexical selection is a competitive process (e.g., La Heij, 1988;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;Roelofs, 2003). The hypothesis of lexical selection by competition proposes that the time it takes to select a NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript target word increases as the levels of activation of nontarget words increase. The primary source of empirical evidence cited in support of lexical selection by competition is the semantic interference effect (e.g., Lupker, 1979;Rosinski, 1977): Naming a picture of an object (e.g., CAR) is slower in the context of a semantic category coordinate distractor word (e.g., truck) compared to an unrelated distractor word (e.g., An alternative to lexical selection by competition is the view that the highest activated lexical node is selected, without regard to the levels of activation of nontarget lexical nodes (e.g., Caramazza, 1997;Dell, 1986;Stemberger, 1985). 2 If one adopted such a model of lexical selection then the range of semantic facilitation effects that have been reported in the literature would follow as a natural consequence (Costa et al., 2005;Finkbeiner & Caramazza, 2006;Mahon et al., 2007). Specifically, such semantic facilitation effects would arise as a result of semantic priming between distractor words and target pictures. However, if one assumed that the semantic facilitation effects arise during lexical selecti...

The "hard problem" in bilingual lexical access arises when translation-equivalent lexical representations are activated to roughly equal levels and, thus, compete equally for lexical selection. The language suppression hypothesis (D. W. Green, 1998) solves this hard problem through the suppression of lexical representations in the nontarget language. Following from this proposal is the prediction that lexical selection should take longer on a language switch trial because the to-be-selected representation was just suppressed on the previous trial. Inconsistent with this prediction, participants took no longer to name pictures in their dominant language on language switch trials than they did on nonswitch trials. These findings indicate that nontarget lexical representations are not suppressed. The authors suggest that these results undermine the viability of the language suppression hypothesis as a possible solution to the hard problem in bilingual lexical access.

The concept of "monitoring" refers to our ability to control our actions on-line. Monitoring involved in speech production is often described in psycholinguistic models as an inherent part of the language system. We probed the specificity of speech monitoring in two psycholinguistic experiments where electroencephalographic activities were recorded. Our focus was on a component previously reported in nonlinguistic manual tasks and interpreted as a marker of monitoring processes. The error negativity (Ne, or error-related negativity), thought to originate in medial frontal areas, peaks shortly after erroneous responses. A component of seemingly comparable properties has been reported, after errors, in tasks requiring access to linguistic knowledge (e.g., speech production), compatible with a generic error-detection process. However, in contrast to its original name, advanced processing methods later revealed that this component is also present after correct responses in visuomotor tasks. Here, we reported the observation of the same negativity after correct responses across output modalities (manual and vocal responses). This indicates that, in language production too, the Ne reflects on-line response monitoring rather than error detection specifically. Furthermore, the temporal properties of the Ne suggest that this monitoring mechanism is engaged before any auditory feedback. The convergence of our findings with those obtained with nonlinguistic tasks suggests that at least part of the monitoring involved in speech production is subtended by a general-purpose mechanism.