Evidence accumulation as a model for lexical selection

• Develops the evidence accumulation framework for lexical selection.
• Empirical and theoretical discussions in the context of psycholinguistic theory.
• A new experiment of canonical picture naming with added context levels.
• A novel quantitative fit of picture naming data with evidence accumulation.
• A connection of the empirical parameter results to psycholinguistic theory.

We propose and demonstrate evidence accumulation as a plausible theoretical and/or empirical model for the lexical selection process of lexical retrieval. A number of current psycholinguistic theories consider lexical selection as a process related to selecting a lexical target from a number of alternatives, which each have varying activations (or signal supports), that are largely resultant of an initial stimulus recognition. We thoroughly present a case for how such a process may be theoretically explained by the evidence accumulation paradigm, and we demonstrate how this paradigm can be directly related or combined with conventional psycholinguistic theory and their simulatory instantiations (generally, neural network models). Then with a demonstrative application on a large new real data set, we establish how the empirical evidence accumulation approach is able to provide parameter results that are informative to leading psycholinguistic theory, and that motivate future theoretical development.