Semantic interference across word classes during lexical selection in Dutch

Abstract

When producing a sentence, speakers must rapidly select appropriate words in the correct order. Models of lexical access often assume that this lexical selection process is competitive and that each word is chosen from a set of competing candidates. Therefore, an important theoretical issue is which factors constrain this choice. Speech error evidence suggests that word class plays a decisive role here and that lexical access is, at any point in time, restricted to words that fit the part of the grammatical structure of the sentence that is being constructed. Using a novel version of the picture-word interference paradigm, Momma, Buffinton, Slevc, and Phillips (2020, Cognition) showed experimentally that word class indeed constrains lexical selection. Specifically, in speakers of American English, action verbs (as in she's singing) competed with semantically related action verbs (as in she's whistling), but not with semantically related action nouns (as in her whistling). Similarly, action nouns only competed with semantically related action nouns, but not with action verbs. As this pattern has important implications for models of lexical access and sentence generation, we conducted a conceptual replication of the study in Dutch. In two experiments, we found a semantic interference effect, but, contrary to the original study, no evidence for a word class constraint. In accounting for these results, we propose that word class constraints on lexical selection are graded rather than categorical, and that, at least for verbs and action nouns, the marking for word class is clearer in English than in Dutch.