Dismissing lexical competition does not make speaking any easier

Abstract

The swinging lexical network proposal (Abdel Rahman & Melinger, 2009a this issue) incorporates three assumptions that are independently motivated and pre-existing in the literature. We claim that the combination of these three assumptions provides an account for a wide range of facilitation and interference observations. In their comment, Mahon and Caramazza question the success of our proposal by challenging the individual assumptions at its core. However, most of their criticisms are built on misconstruals of our proposal. Here, we revisit their points and clarify our position with regard to their specific concerns.We maintain that competition models do not necessitate an over-complication of lexical selection but rather provide an elegant and consistent mechanism to capture many empirical observations.