On the origin of the cumulative semantic inhibition effect

We report an extension of the cumulative semantic inhibition effect found by Howard, Nickels, Coltheart, and Cole-Virtue (2006). Using more sensitive statistical analyses, we found a significant variation in the magnitude of the effect across categories. This variation cannot be explained by the naming speed of each category. In addition, using a sub-sample of the data, a second cumulative effect arouse for newly-defined supra-categories, over and above the effect of the original ones. We discuss these findings in terms of the representations that drive lexical access, and interpret them as supporting featural or distributed hypotheses

Aspects sémantiques et syntaxiques de l’accès au lexique lors de la production de parole

[IN FRENCH] The speech production processes that have been studied in this thesis are the mechanisms of information processing that bridge the gap between the selection of a message to communicate and the articulation of the words that will covey it. More precisely, we conducted a cognitive study of the processes involved in lexical access. The first part of this thesis is a general introduction to the field that includes a survey of the literature. Secondly, we present a collection of normative data that characterizes an important number of experimental stimuli (pictures and words). The study of the semantic and syntactic aspects of lexical selection is then approached by means of the picture naming paradigm, among others.\ud The experiments that tackled the role of syntactic information show the existence of a syntactic congruency effect when grammatical gender properties are manipulated. This effect is only present for closed-class primes (determiners) and is not due to the phonological form of the prime-target pairs. It is interpreted as the consequence of an irrepressible binding of the prime and the target. Such a binding is probably due to the influence of a syntactic processing initiated by the prime on the lexical selection of a name for the picture.\ud The experiments on the semantic aspects show a dissociation between semantics and verbal association in the production system. After being operationally distinguished, theses two kinds of relations showed very different priming patterns. Moreover, these priming effects were differently affected by time parameters. The results are interpreted in the context of models of lexical access during the production of isolated words