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The language production literature has given only little attention to the dynamics of closed class word selection, such as determiner selection, and its temporal relation to the selection of open class words. The goal of this paper was to investigate whether determiner selection follows serially after lexical selection, or whether there is cascading. If there is cascading, the additional goal was to determine whether the selection of the correct determinerinvolves a competitive process. A go-nogo picture–word interference task was therefore performed in which gender congruency and categorical relation between distractor and target was manipulated and EEG was recorded. The ERP analysis showed that categorical relatedness helped determiner selection on gender congruent trials, but hindered on incongruent trials. This indicates that lexical selection and determiner selection overlap in time, and suggest that determiner selection is a competitive process.

In their comment, Roelofs, Piai, and Schriefers (2011) argue against our interpretation of the distractor frequency effect in terms of a late blocking mechanism. They state that the experiments reported by Dhooge and Hartsuiker (2010) can be incorporated in WEAVER++ when assuming an early input blocking mechanism. We first rectify a misunderstanding regarding the claim of the target article. Next, we show that Roelofs et al. provide no evidence that allows differentiating between early and late blocking accounts. We end by providing evidence in favor of our claim that distractor blocking occurs late and specify our blocking account in terms of verbal self-monitoring.

Current views of lexical selection in language production differ in whether they assume lexical selection by competition or not. To account for recent data with the picture-word interference (PWI) task, both views need to be supplemented with assumptions about the control processes that block distractor naming. In this paper, we propose that such control is achieved by the verbal self-monitor. If monitoring is involved in the PWI task, performance in this task should be affected by variables that influence monitoring such as lexicality, lexicality of context, and time pressure. Indeed, pictures were named more quickly when the distractor was a pseudoword than a word (Experiment 1), which reversed in a context of pseudoword items (Experiment 3). Additionally, under time pressure, participants frequently named the distractor instead of the picture, suggesting that the monitor failed to exclude the distractor response. Such errors occurred more often with word than pseudoword distractors (Experiment 2); however, the effect flipped around in a pseudoword context (Experiment 4). Our findings argue for the role of the monitoring system in lexical selection. Implications for competitive and non-competitive models are discussed.

In 3 experiments, subjects named pictures with low- or high-frequency superimposed distractor words. In a 1st experiment, we replicated the finding that low-frequency words induce more interference in picture naming than high-frequency words (i.e., distractor frequency effect; Miozzo & Caramazza, 2003). According to the response exclusion hypothesis, this effect has its origin at a postlexical stage and is related to a response buffer. The account predicts that the distractor frequency effect should only be present when a response to the word enters the response buffer. This was tested by masking the distractor (Experiment 2) and by presenting it at various time points before stimulus onset (Experiment 3). Results supported the hypothesis by showing that the effect was only present when distractors were visible, and if they were presented in close proximity to the target picture. These results have implications for the models of lexical access and for the tasks that can be used to study this process.