Why opening a door is as easy as eating an apple : A reply to Thompson - Schill and Botvinick ( 2006 )

Martin and Cheng (2006) present evidence suggesting that difficulty in verb generation is related to the strength of associative links between nouns and verbs and not to competition from alternative verb responses. Specifically, they show that latencies for verb generation are related to the associative strength of the most frequently produced verb and not to the ratio of the strength of the first to the second most frequently produced verb. Thompson-Schill and Botvinick (2006) have provided modeling results indicating how the findings of Martin and Cheng might be accommodated in a competitive model. Here we discuss how two noncompetitive models account for the findings and why such models should be preferred.