Wido La Heij

How Does Bilingualism Improve Executive Control? A Comparison of Active and Reactive Inhibition Mechanisms

It has been claimed that bilingualism enhances inhibitory control, but the available evidence is equivocal. The authors evaluated several possible versions of the inhibition hypothesis by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals with regard to stop signal performance, inhibition of return, and the attentional blink. These three phenomena, it can be argued, tap into different aspects of inhibition. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in stop signal reaction time and thus were comparable in terms of active-inhibitory efficiency. However, bilinguals showed no facilitation from spatial cues, showed a strong inhibition of return effect, and exhibited a more pronounced attentional blink. These results suggest that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition but have acquired a better ability to maintain action goals and to use them to bias goal-related information. Under some circumstances, this ability may indirectly lead to more pronounced reactive inhibition of irrelevant information.

Semantic facilitation and semantic interference in word translation: Implications for models of lexical access in language production

Abstract We first show that in a word-translation task, context words induce semantic interference whereas context pictures induce semantic facilitation. Experiments 2 and 3 show that this finding is not due to differences between context words and context pictures in terms of (a) relative speed of lexical activation or (b) the category level of the activated concepts. To account for our findings, we propose that conceptually-driven lexical access is confined to the selected target concept (or “preverbal message”). A version of Starreveld and La Heij’s (1996) connectionist model in which this proposal was implemented successfully simulated the polarity and the time course of the semantic context effects observed. In Experiment 4 the prediction that context pictures do not induce lexical context effects was tested and confirmed.

Components of Stroop-like interference in picture naming

The semantic interference effect observed in Stroop tasks and picture-word interference tasks might be due to the previous confounding of semantic similarity with task relevance (in the Stroop task) and with perceptual similarity (in the picture-word interference task). A picture-word variant of the Stroop task was devised in which the factors of task relevance and perceptual similarity were controlled. The distractor conditions allowed for the examination of four types of context effects. The results show that the overall Stroop-like interference effect can be decomposed into interference effects due to (1) a semantic relation between distractor and target, (2) the semantic relevance of the distractor word in the task at hand, (3) the presence of the distractor word in the response set, and (4) the mere presence of a word. Implications of these findings for the locus or loci of Stroop and picture-word interference effects are discussed. It is concluded that distractor words in Stroop-like naming tasks interfere mainly in the process of name retrieval.

A further look at semantic context effects in language production: The role of response congruency

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Düngelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic context effect: the semantic selection account by Costa, Mahon, Savova, and Caramazza (2003) and a response-congruency account. Experiments 1a and 1b show that category names induce semantic interference in basic-level naming, a finding that disproves the semantic selection account and is in line with the response-congruency account. Experiment 2 reveals that response congruency is probably a major contributor to the overall facilitation effect in categorisation tasks. Finally, Experiment 3 tests and confirms a prediction of the response-congruency account in basic-level naming with subordinate-level distractors. The authors conclude that the available evidence support the response-congruency account and suggest that this congruency effect is localised at the stage of constructing a preverbal message.

PICTURE-WORD INTERFERENCE INCREASES WITH TARGET-SET SIZE

In the picture-word interference task the naming of a picture is hampered by the presence of a distractor word that is to be ignored. Two main components of this interference effect can be distinguished: an interference effect induced by an unrelated distractor word in comparison with a nonword control, and an additional interference effect that is due to a semantic similarity between target and distractor (calledsemantic interference). We examine whether the size of these two interference effects is affected by the number of different target pictures in an experiment. The results show that both interference effects increase with the size of the target set. This finding has two implications. First, at an empirical level, the use of a relatively small number of target pictures may account for remarkably small, or even nonsignificant, picture-word interference effects in a number of previous studies. Second, at a theoretical level, the present finding is in accordance with a name-retrieval account of picture-word interference.

The Functional Unit of Japanese Word Naming: Evidence From Masked Priming

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora based, we report the results of 4 experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated using Japanese kana script that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana; again, facilitation effects were found only when the whole mora and not the onset segment overlapped. Experiment 4 distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first 3 experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable. Again, no priming effect was found for single segments. Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.

The limitations of cascading in the speech production system

Two competing views on how information flows in the speech production system are discussed. The full-cascading view holds that all activated concepts automatically activate their lexical and phonological representations. The limited-cascading view holds that a selection procedure interrupts the automatic flow of information through the speech production system. Recently, the full-cascading view has received support from the observation that ignored pictures activate their phonological representation. In two experiments the conditions to observe this finding were examined. Using coloured pictures to name, we replicated the finding that when the pictures name is phonologically related to the name of its colour, the colour-naming task is facilitated compared with when the name of the picture is unrelated. We also show that this effect is stronger when naming the picture has been practiced. By contrast, the colours name has no effect on naming the picture, not even when colour naming is practiced. We conclude that strong versions of both the full-cascading view and the limited-cascading view cannot account for the complete set of data.

Components of stroop-like interference in word reading

Previous research has shown that the naming of the picture of, for example, a guitar is substantially delayed when it is accompanied by the name of an object from the same semantic category (e.g., piano) as compared to a nonword control (e.g., xxxxx). La Heij (1988a) has shown that a large part of this Stroop-like interference effect can be attributed to two semantic characteristics of the distractor word: its semantic similarity to the target picture and its semantic relevance in the task at hand. Furthermore, it was argued that the locus of these two interference effects is the process of target-name retrieval. If this is true, semantic interference effects should diminish or disappear when, instead of a picture-naming task, a word-reading task is used. In the present study this prediction is tested. The effects of four distractor characteristics are examined: semantic relatedness, semantic relevance, response set membership and wordness. In contrast to the original picture-naming task only the effect of wordness reached significance. The results of experiments 2 and 3 show that the absence of significant semantic context effects in experiment 1 is not simply due to the fact that a distractor word has less time to affect a word-reading response. The results are taken to support a name-retrieval account of semantic interference in color and picture naming.

Phonological facilitation of grammatical gender retrieval.

In Dutch, the gender of nouns is marked by the definite articles de (common gender) and het (neuter gender). Most models of language production assume that gender information is retrieved via the nouns syntactic representation (or lemma). The authors test Caramazzas (1997) alternative proposal, according to which gender information is retrieved via the nouns phonological word form (or lexeme). In three picture-word experiments, which differed in the tasks to be performed (noun production, article+noun production, article production, and gender decision), clear phonological effects were obtained in tasks involving the retrieval of the nouns gender information. It is argued that traditional models of language production have difficulty in accounting for the occurrence and/or the size of these effects whereas they follow quite naturally from Caramazzas (1997) Independent Network model.

Semantic interference and orthographic facilitation in definition naming.

Semantic interference and orthographic facilitation are common findings in Stroop-like color and picture-naming tasks. We investigated whether these context effects are also obtained when, instead of colors or pictures, definitions are used as target stimuli. In Experiment 1 both effects were obtained when definitions of colors such as «THE COLOR OF TOMATOES?» had to be named. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which the definitions were taken from a larger set of semantic categories. The remaining 4 experiments showed that the semantic interference effect cannot be attributed to a strategic match or nonmatch decision (Experiment 3) and does not show up when the distractor word precedes the definition (Experiments 4, 5, and 6)