Long-lasting inhibitory semantic context effects on object naming are necessarily conceptually mediated: Implications for models of lexical-semantic encoding

• Blocked and continuous context effects on word production originate at the conceptual level.
• Continuous context effects on object naming and semantic classification interact.
• Context effects result from incremental learning at the conceptual level.
• Context effects are cumulative in continuous but not in blocked paradigms.
• None of the existing accounts of context effects can fully explain the findings.

When participants name several taxonomically related objects in close succession, they display persistent interference effects. Experimental manipulations of the semantic naming context have been used in two variants, a blocked and a continuous paradigm. Counterintuitively, results from previous studies suggest that the context effects induced by these paradigms arise at distinct levels of processing, namely at the lemma level (blocked paradigm), and at the interface of conceptual and lexical representations (continuous paradigm). In five experiments, both variants of the paradigm were assessed in object naming, semantic classification, word naming, and word-plus-determiner naming tasks. Experiments 1–3 show that participants display semantic context effects only in those tasks that mandatorily require conceptual processing (semantic classification, object naming). Experiment 4 fails to replicate the finding that, in the continuous paradigm, semantic context effects can transfer from object naming to word-plus-determiner naming but not vice versa, instead yielding no transfer in either direction. Experiment 5 demonstrates that the effects seen in semantic classification and object naming influence each other, suggesting that they are causally linked and that they both originate at the conceptual level. The implications of these findings for current accounts of lexical-semantic encoding in word production are discussed.