Hutson, J. 1 , Damian, M. 1 & Spalek, K. . 2
1 School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
2 Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
A number of studies have recently reported that in picture-word interference tasks, distractors with a low frequency of occurrence interfere more with picture naming than distractors with high frequency. This finding is not straightforward to accommodate within traditional accounts of word production in which lexical access is typically conceptualised as competitive. Instead, the distractor frequency effect has been taken to support a view according to which lexical access is not competitive, and picture-word interference effects arise at a post-lexical preparation stage. Two experiments are reported which contrasted picture naming with a manual task performed on the picture name (Experiment 1: syllable judgment; Experiment 2: phoneme monitoring). In both studies, an equivalent effect of distractor frequency was observed for vocal and manual tasks, suggesting that the effect arises at a shared, abstract processing level. Consequently, the distractor frequency effect should not be interpreted as evidence for the claim that distractors have to be excluded from an articulatory response buffer before target naming can proceed.