Department of Neurocognitive Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 9;17(6):e0268915. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268915. eCollection 2022.
When naming a sequence of pictures of the same semantic category (e.g., furniture), response latencies systematically increase with each named category member. This cumulative semantic interference effect has become a popular tool to investigate the cognitive architecture of language production. However, not all processes underlying the effect itself are fully understood, including the question where the effect originates from. While some researchers assume the interface of the conceptual and lexical level as its origin, others suggest the conceptual-semantic level. The latter assumption follows from the observation that cumulative effects, namely cumulative facilitation, can also be observed in purely conceptual-semantic tasks. Another unanswered question is whether cumulative interference is affected by the morphological complexity of the experimental targets. In two experiments with the same participants and the same material, we investigated both of these issues. Experiment 1, a continuous picture naming task, investigated whether morphologically complex nouns (e.g., kitchen table) elicit identical levels of cumulative interference to morphologically simple nouns (e.g., table). Our results show this to be the case, indicating that cumulative interference is unaffected by lexical information such as morphological complexity. In Experiment 2, participants classified the same target objects as either man-made or natural. As expected, we observed cumulative facilitation. A separate analysis showed that this facilitation effect can be predicted by the individuals' effect sizes of cumulative interference, suggesting a strong functional link between the two effects. Our results thus point to a conceptual-semantic origin of cumulative semantic interference.
当对同一语义类别（例如家具）的一系列图片进行命名时，命名每个类别成员的反应时会系统地增加。这种累积的语义干扰效应已成为研究语言产生认知结构的常用工具。然而，对于该效应本身的所有潜在过程，包括其起源的问题，并非都被充分理解。虽然一些研究人员假设该效应源自概念和词汇层面的接口，但另一些研究人员则认为其源自概念-语义层面。后一种假设源于这样一种观察结果，即累积效应（即累积促进）也可以在纯粹的概念-语义任务中观察到。另一个未解决的问题是，累积干扰是否受实验目标的形态复杂性的影响。在两个具有相同参与者和相同材料的实验中，我们研究了这两个问题。实验 1 是一项连续的图片命名任务，研究了形态复杂的名词（例如厨房桌子）是否会引起与形态简单的名词（例如桌子）相同水平的累积干扰。我们的结果表明情况确实如此，表明累积干扰不受词汇信息（例如形态复杂性）的影响。在实验 2 中，参与者将相同的目标对象分类为人造或自然。正如预期的那样，我们观察到了累积促进。单独的分析表明，这种促进效应可以通过个体的累积干扰效应大小来预测，这表明这两种效应之间存在很强的功能联系。因此，我们的结果表明，累积语义干扰的起源是概念-语义层面的。
