Electrophysiological evidence that inhibition supports lexical selection in picture naming

Abstract

Inhibition N2Picture naming a b s t r a c tWe investigated the neural basis of inhibitory control during lexical selection. Participants overtly named pictures while response times (RTs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The difficulty of lexical selection was manipulated by using object and action pictures with high name agreement (few response candidates) versus low name agreement (many response candidates). To assess the involvement of inhibition, we conducted delta plot analyses of naming RTs and examined the N2 component of the ERP. We found longer mean naming RTs and a larger N2 amplitude in the low relative to the high name agreement condition. For action naming we found a negative correlation between the slopes of the slowest delta segment and the difference in N2 amplitude between the low and high name agreement conditions. The converging behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that selective inhibition is engaged to reduce competition during lexical selection in picture naming.

Switching between spoken language-production tasks: the role of attentional inhibition and enhancement

“…For a computationally implemented model of the role of attentional enhancement in word and phrase production, we refer to Roelofs (2003Roelofs ( , 2006Roelofs ( , 2008aRoelofs ( , 2014, and for the role of enhancement, updating, and shifting, we refer to Roelofs (2007Roelofs ( , 2008b and Roelofs and Piai (2011). The results of the present experiments highlight the importance of including inhibition in accounts of the attentional control of phrase production, in line with the findings of Shao, Roelofs, Acheson, and Meyer (2014) and Shao et al (2015) on single word production.…”

Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic

“…As in our study, they found that name agreement was a significant predictor of naming latencies and that this variable had a late effect on word production (around 400 ms after picture onset and until 100 ms before response articulation). Similarly, Shao, Roelofs, Acheson, and Meyer (2014) conducted a picture-naming study with a group of high-and another of low-name-agreement (measured by the H index) stimuli using ERPs. They found that NA affected naming latencies.…”

Language Control and Code-switching

“…Such an increase most likely reflects inhibition of a habitual plan to name the word rather than the colour in which it is printed. linked to the suppression of lexical competitors (e.g., de Zubicaray et al 2006;Shao et al 2014). If so, any effects of binding competition associated with coupled control prior to the actual code-switch should be detectable, all else being equal, as increased frontal activation relative to baseline utterances where there is no code-switching.…”