Frequency effect in access to phonological properties of picture names

Picture naming is a highly popular task in language production research. In particular, the frequency effect obtained in picture naming is generally considered as the signature of lexical access in speech production. However, it is quite well established that picture naming is very sensitive to the phonetic properties of the word to be produced, imposing some limitations in using this task. In this paper, we look for a frequency effect in the lexical access to picture names, by means of a phoneme-monitoring task. This task requires access to the object name’s phonological representation but not its actual articulation. We found a robust frequency effect. Two additional experiments—visual object identification and semantic categorization—allow us to assume that the locus for the frequency effect is lexical.