Lexical access in the oral produccion of verbs

Maira Alija Fernández and Fernando Cuetos Vega
University of Oviedo

Many studies have investigated lexical access in oral production, but the majority have used pictures of objects as stimuli. Few experiments have been done with stimuli from other grammatical categories such as verbs and adjetives. In this poster two experiments using verbs are exposed. In the first experiment 63 drawings of actions of the battery of Masterson and Druks (2000) were shown to 54 participants to name. The reaction times were correlated with the main variables that influence object naming, that is, frequency, compound frequency, familiarity, imageability, visual complexity, name agreement and age of acquisition. Only name agreement, age of acquisition and length appeared as significant. Neither the frequency nor the familiarity so determinant in object naming had significant correlation with the naming times. In the regression analysis age of acquisition and name agreement appeared as significant. In the second experiment the word-picture interference paradigm was used. Two kind of pictures (objects and actions) and four kind of interferences were proved: nouns semantically related to the picture, verbs semantically related, nouns without relation and verb without relation. We found that verbs only produce semantic interference when the picture is an action but not when it is an object. Exactly the opposite to what happen with nouns which do not produce interference when the picture is an action. The results of these two experiments mark differences in the lexical access based on the grammatical category of the words: the determinant variables of lexical access are different in nouns and verbs, and lexical competition between words of different grammatical categories do not exist.