{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-information-theoretic-account-of-semantic","title":"An information-theoretic account of semantic interference in word production","arxiv_id":"2006.12578","date":"2020-06-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Richard Futrell"],"abstract":"I present a computational-level model of semantic interference effects in word production. Word production is cast as a rate-distortion problem where an agent selects words to minimize a measure of cost while also minimizing the resources used to compute the output word based on perceptual input and behavioral goals. I show that similarity-based interference among words arises naturally in this setup, and I present a series of simulations showing that the model captures some of the key empirical patterns observed in Stroop and Picture-Word Interference paradigms. I argue that the rate-distortion account of interference provides a high-level formalization of computational principles that are instantiated more mechanistically in existing models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12578v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.12578v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-information-theoretic-account-of-semantic","repo_url":"https://github.com/langprocgroup/wordprodmodel","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}