The cumulative semantic cost in speech production A semantic or lexical phenomenon?

The time required to name a picture is affected by the context in which that picture is named. The cumulative semantic cost (CSC) describes a phenomen on in which picture naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. We test whether the CSC requires the assumption of lexical selection by competition. In Experiment 1 participants named a sequence of pictures, while in Experiment 2 participants named words instead of pictures, preceded by a gender marked determiner. In the picture naming experiment, we replicate the basic CSC, while in the word naming experiment we find no CSC. These findings indicate that the CSC arises prior to lexical access, and thus that the phenomenon does not require the assumption of lexical selection by competition. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of lexical access.