The semantic blocking effect in word naming task: Evidence from Chinese classifier-noun phrase production

The semantic blocking effect in the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm has been widely investigated and provides implications for the models of lexical access. However, it is not clear why this effect in word naming task was not quite stable as in picture naming task. One reason is that the target words may be directly spoken out without semantic retrieval in the single word naming tasks. To avoid this possibility, some previous studies used the “determiner + noun” phrases instead of bare noun naming. This study was trying to provide another kind of materials for the word naming studies - the Chinese classifiers. In this study, two “one-classifier-noun” phrase naming experiments were conducted and the semantic blocking effect was observed in both experiments. These results confirmed the semantic blocking effect observed in word naming task and the corresponding implications for the models of lexical access.