ABSTRACT
Brédart, Valentine, Calder and Gassi (1995) described an interactive activation and competition (IAC) model in which the lexical representations of people’s names have inhibitory connections between each other, but do not receive inhibition from the representation of biographical properties. The model predicts that people would be slower to name a celebrity for whom two names are equally available than they would be to name an equally familiar celebrity for whom only one name is available. However, naming should only be slowed by competition from a competing name; a highly available biographical property should not increase face naming latency. These predictions were confirmed in a simulation of the model. The effect is referred to as the nominal competitor effect. Experiment 1 showed that participants who had practiced naming actors using both the actor’s name (e.g. John Cleese) and the character’s name (e.g. Basil Fawlty) were slower to produce the actor’s name at test than were participants who had practiced producing only the actor’s name. However, practice in naming the relevant television series (e.g. Fawlty Towers) did not inhibit subsequent production of the actor’s name. In contrast to the semantic competitor effect in picture naming, the effect reported here was found to be long-lasting (Experiment 2).
