Picture–word interference and the response–exclusion hypothesis

In the picture-word interference task a to be named picture is presented along with a to be ignored superimposed distractor word. This task has been widely employed to investigate the architecture of the processes underlying word production. A new account of performance in the picture-word interference task has been recently put forward, the response-exclusion hypothesis. In this work, we test the response-exclusion hypothesis against a concise set of 5 published experimental results and show that it fails to account for some basic phenomena that are observed with the picture-word interference task.