Naming action in Japanese: Effects of semantic similarity and grammatical class

Iwasaki, Noriko; Vinson, David P.; Vigliocco, Gabriella; Watanabe, Masumi; Arciuli, Joanne

Abstract

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with partici-
pants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic similarity between distracters and targets (similar vs. dissimilar verbs) and the grammatical class of semantically
dissimilar distracters (verbs, verbal nouns, and also nouns in Experiment 3) in addition to task demands (single word naming vs. phrase/sentence generation). While Experiment 1 used visually presented distracters, Experiment 2 and 3
used auditory distracter words to rule out possible confounding factors of orthography (kanji vs. hiragana). We found the same results for all three experiments: robust semantic interference in the absence of any effects of
grammatical class. We discuss the lack of grammatical class effects in terms of structural characteristics of the Japanese language.

Citation

Iwasaki, N., Vinson, D. P., Vigliocco, G., Watanabe, M., & Arciuli, J. (2008). Naming action in Japanese: Effects of semantic similarity and grammatical class. Language and cognitive processes, 23(6), 889-930. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960801916196

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Feb 13, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 2, 2108
• Journal: Language and Cognitive Processes
• Print ISSN: 0169-0965
• Electronic ISSN: 1464-0732
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 889-930
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960801916196