Semantic Interference in Blocked Picture Naming: Does It Become Cumulative with Large Local Response Sets?

The naming of a picture is delayed if the speaker has recently named one or more semantically related pictures. Such interference has been found both when large numbers of pictures are named once (continuous naming) and when small subsets of pictures (four to six) are named repeatedly (blocked-cyclic naming). It has been attributed to an adaptive learning mechanism that incrementally changes the connection weights between semantic and lexical representations across naming episodes. However, the interference shows a different development in the tasks: it is cumulative in continuous naming and non-cumulative in blocked-cyclic naming. It has been argued that the use of small local response sets in blocked naming, which are easily identified and stored in working memory, introduces an additional process that constrains semantic interference. We reasoned that such a process should be less likely to be effective, and thus the interference should become cumulative, as the local response sets become larger and are less easily identified. We conducted a standard blocked-cyclic naming experiment and a blocked-interleaved naming variant thereof with local response sets of 10 and 19 items, respectively. The interference increased from presentation 1 to presentation 3 but not further. We discuss the implications of our findings.