Can the humped animal's knee conceal its name? Commentary on: “The roles of shared vs. distinctive conceptual features in lexical access”

Citation: Montefinese M and Vinson D (2015) Can the humped animal's knee conceal its name? Commentary on: " The roles of shared vs. distinctive conceptual features in lexical access ". Can the humped animal's knee conceal its name? Commentary on: " The roles of shared vs. distinctive conceptual features in lexical access " The representation of meaning is a pivotal topic for theories of language processing. A prevalent view is based on semantic features, considering conceptual representations as distributed patterns of activity across sets of features related to different aspects of knowledge and experience (e. These features can vary in their relative salience to a concept's meaning and co-occur to various degrees across concepts. For example , distinctive features occur in few concepts and allow people to distinguish very similar concepts (Grondin et al., 2009), while shared features occur across many concepts thus indicating similarity among them (Montefinese et al., 2014a). Existing studies yield conflicting results about the relevance of featural characteristics (Montefinese et al., 2014b), leaving it unclear what theoretical interpretations can be drawn. Vieth et al. (2014) recently sought to clarify the role of feature distinctiveness in a picture-word interference (PWI) task. In Experiment 1, they employed categorically-related distractor-target pairs matched for semantic similarity, while manipulating distinctiveness of the distractor feature. Experiments 2 and 3 employed part-whole distractor pairs while manipulating distinctiveness and visibility of the distractor feature in the target picture. Distinctiveness had an extremely constrained effect: non-distinctive feature distractors slowed target naming, but only at an SOA of −150 ms and only when they were visible in the picture (Experiment 3). The authors conclude that semantic interference in the PWI paradigm is due to conceptual feature overlap and thus consistent with lexical selection by competition (Roelofs, 1992) rather than the response exclusion hypothesis introduced by Mahon et al. (2007).Unfortunately, these conclusions are undermined by lack of a crucial statistical interaction to motivate follow-up testing, poor control of semantic measures, and an inadequate account of the role distinctiveness would play in lexical retrieval. Vieth et al. found one effect of distinctiveness: in Experiment 3, " non-distinctive part-whole target relations showed picture naming latencies significantly at −150 ms SOA compared to their matched unrelated pairings " (p. 9). However, such conclusions are not warranted by the evidence provided. The authors drew conclusions from partial interactions without a significant