What does the articulatory output buffer know about alternative picture names? Evidence against the response-exclusion hypothesis

When participants name pictures in the presence of a distractor word, a semantic relation between distractor word and picture name interferes with the naming response. Some models take this to reflect a lexical-competition process, while other models assume it to result from a post-lexical response-exclusion mechanism. According to the latter view, the distractor word has privileged access to an articulatory output buffer and has to be purged from it before the picture name can be produced. This buffer is assumed to have access to information which is relevant within a given task, such as gross semantic category information. Any (semantic) similarity between the picture name and the distractor word then should render removal of the distractor more difficult and thus prolong naming latencies. However, more fine-grained semantic information is not accessible to the articulatory output buffer, and thus should not affect naming performance. We tested this assumption by comparing the effect of two semantic distractor conditions keeping the semantic relation between distractor words and the to-be-produced (basic-level) picture names constant, while manipulating only the relation between the distractor and the pictures’ subordinate-level name. Contrary to the predictions of the response-exclusion hypothesis, this manipulation, determined whether or not semantic interference was obtained.