Abstract

Accessing information from memory can make accessing other related information more problematic. The Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) phenomenon refers to the observation that accessing one specific word (e.g., chair) impairs the successive access to words from the same semantic category (e.g., table) (Anderson et al., 1994). In this article we focused on to explore whether RIF is also reliable in a picture naming task. We explore whether the time to name a picture is affected by a previous memory task, in which participants are asked to memorize pictures from different semantic categories. Pictures in the naming phase could be or not from the same categories as those presented in the memory phase. We observed slower naming latencies for those pictures belonging to semantic categories that were presented to memorize in the first phase. These results suggest the existence of significant interactions between episodic memory and lexical access. We discuss our results in the context of current models of lexical access during speech production.