Will Antonio Banderas harm Javier Bardem?: Semantic competition during face naming.

Abstract

This experiment studies semantic competition during naming of famous faces. Previous results (Vitkovitch, Potton, Bakogianni, & Kinch, 2006) have shown semantic priming instead of semantic competition when participants were asked to name a target face after naming a categorically related priming face 3 trials before. Results of the present experiment replicated this semantic priming effect during naming. However, we also found a decrement in semantic facilitation when the number of named faces from the same category was increased. These results suggest that face naming, like object naming, is semantically mediated and vulnerable to interference processes as predicted by serial naming models.