Naming pictures and sounds: Stimulus type affects semantic context effects

Semantic context effects obtained in naming tasks have been most influential in devising and evaluating models of word production. We re-investigated this effect in the frequently used blocked-cyclic naming task in which stimuli are presented repeatedly either sorted by semantic category (homogeneous context) or intermixed (heterogeneous context). Previous blocked-cyclic naming studies have shown slower picture naming responses in the homogeneous context. Our study compared this context effect in two task versions, picture naming and sound naming. Target words were identical across task versions (e.g., participants responded with the word “dog” to either the picture of that animal or to the sound [barking] produced by it). We found semantic interference in the homogeneous context also with sounds and the effect was substantially larger than with pictures (Experiments 1 and 2). This difference is unlikely to result from extended perceptual processing of sounds as compared to pictures (Experiments 3 and 4) or from stronger links between pictures and object names than between sounds and object names (Experiment 5). Overall, our results show that semantic context effects in blocked-cyclic naming generalize to stimulus types other than pictures and – in part – also reflect pre-lexical processes that depend on the nature of the stimuli used for eliciting the naming responses.