The present chapter reports an experimental study of the semantic basis of lexical selection in speech. In a picture-word interference study, subjects named pictured objects while ignoring semantically related or unrelated distracters. It was found that the related distracters inhibited picture naming in comparison to the unrelated distracters. Indeed, the extent to which a related distracter elicited inhibition was predicted by the semantic similarity of distracter and target picture lexical concepts. Semantic inhibition is thought to show the effect of distracter presentation on the competition for lexical selection between candidate words in conceptually-driven speech. The results of the experiment suggest that such competition is more intense for more similar words. Measures of semantic similarity derived from lexical co-occurrence did not usefully predict observed semantic inhibition. The rated similarity of stimulus pairs was, however found to be useful in predicting inhibition. The results are discussed in relation to current models of lexical selection and of semantic space.
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