The Locus of the Word Frequency Effect in Speech Production: Evidence from the Picture-word Interference Task

말소리 산출에서 단어빈도효과의 위치 : 그림-단어간섭과제에서 나온 증거

Two experiments were conducted to determine the exact locus of the frequency effect in speech production. Experiment 1 addressed the question as to whether the word frequency effect arise from the stage of lemma selection. A picture-word interference task was performed to test the significance of interactions between the effects of target frequency, distractor frequency and semantic relatedness. There was a significant interaction between the distractor frequency and the semantic relatedness and between the target and the distractor frequency. Experiment 2 examined whether the word frequency effect is attributed to the lexeme level which represent phonological information of words. A methodological logic applied to Experiment 2 was the same as that of Experiment 1. There was no significant interaction between the distractor frequency and the phonological relatedness. These results demonstrate that word frequency has influence on the processes involved in selecting a correct lemma corresponding to an activated lexical concept in speech production.