  Studies of word production often make use of picture naming tasks, including
the picture word interference task. In this task, participants name pictures
with superimposed distractor words. They typically need more time to name
pictures when the distractor word is semantically related to the picture than
when it is unrelated (the semantic interference effect). The present study
examines the distributional properties of this effect in a series of Bayesian
meta-analyses. Meta-analytic estimates of the semantic interference effect
first show that the effect is present throughout the reaction time distribution
and that it increases throughout the distribution. Second, we find a
correlation between a participant's mean semantic interference effect and the
change in the effect in the tail of the reaction time distribution, which has
been argued to reflect the involvement of selective inhibition in the naming
task. Finally, we show with simulated data that this correlation emerges even
when no inhibition is used to generate the data, which suggests that inhibition
is not needed to explain this relationship.

Neurons and Cognition