Lexical Access in Comprehension vs. Production: Spatiotemporal Localization of Semantic Facilitation and Interference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Humans understand words faster when they are preceded by semantically related words. This facilitation is thought to result from spreading activation between words with similar meanings. Interestingly, in language production, semantic relatedness often has the opposite effect: in object naming for example, a related prior word delays the naming time of the current object. This could be due to competition during conceptual search or later interference at the motor preparation stage. However, no study has systematically compared the facilitory and inhibitory effects and thus their neurobiological relationship is unknown. We contrasted maximally parallel production and comprehension tasks during magnetoencephalography and found that in comprehension (specifically word reading), semantic relatedness modulated activity in the left middle STG at 180-335ms, consistent with prior findings on the spatiotemporal localization of lexical access. In contrast, a semantic interference pattern for the production task (object naming) occurred in a post-lexical time-window at 395-485ms in left posterior insular cortex, consistent with post-lexical motor preparation. Thus, our data show that semantic priming during comprehension and interference during production are not two sides of the same coin but rather they clearly dissociate in space and time, consistent with a lexical account for comprehension and a post-lexical one for production. Significance statement The processing of semantically related words has been a central tool for understanding the organization of the mental lexicon. One striking observation is that semantic relatedness tends to be facilitory in comprehension but inhibitory in language production, perhaps because only production involves a conceptual search through semantically related candidates. The neurobiology of this contrast is not understood. Our magnetoencephalography results demonstrate that the facilitory pattern is first observed in classic left temporal lexical access regions at ~200ms, whereas the inhibitory pattern occurs later and in the insular cortex. These findings show that the two effects do not co-localize in space or time and suggest that the inhibitory effects in production stem from a late motor preparation stage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".