Accessing semantic information has negative consequences for successive recovering attempts of similar information. For instance, in the course of picture-naming tasks, the time required to name an object is determined by the total number of items from the same category that have already been named; naming latencies increase proportionally to the total number of semantically related words named previously. This phenomenon is called cumulative semantic cost (or interference). Two picture-naming experiments with children (4–11 years old, 229 participants) investigate whether having successfully named the previous within-category items is a necessary condition for the cumulative semantic cost to appear. We anticipated that younger children would have a larger rate of nonresponses compared with older children, reflecting the fact that younger children have not yet consolidated many lexical representations. Our results confirmed this prediction. Critically, we also observed that cumulative semantic cost was independent of having successfully retrieved previous within-category lexical items. Furthermore, picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a nonresponse showed the same amount of cost as those picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a correct naming event. Our findings indicate that it is the attempt to retrieve a lexical unit, and not the successful retrieval of a specific lexical unit, that causes semantic cost in picture naming. This cost can be explained by a mechanism of weakening the semantic-to-lexical mappings of semantic coordinate words. The findings are also discussed in the context of retrieval-induced forgetting effects in memory recall research.

访问语义信息对连续恢复类似信息的尝试具有负面影响。例如，在图片命名任务过程中，命名一个对象所需的时间取决于已命名的同一类别中的项目总数；命名延迟与先前命名的语义相关单词的总数成正比。这种现象称为累积语义成本（或干扰）。两项针对儿童（4-11 岁，229 名参与者）的图片命名实验调查了成功命名之前的类别内项目是否是出现累积语义成本的必要条件。我们预计，与年龄较大的儿童相比，年龄较小的儿童的无应答率更高，反映了年幼的孩子还没有巩固许多词汇表征的事实。我们的结果证实了这一预测。至关重要的是，我们还观察到累积语义成本与是否成功检索到先前的类别内词汇项无关。此外，前一个类别内项目引发无响应的图片试验显示出与前一个类别内项目引发正确命名事件的那些图片试验相同的成本。我们的研究结果表明，是检索词汇单元的尝试，而不是特定词汇单元的成功检索，导致了图片命名中的语义成本。这种成本可以通过削弱语义坐标词的语义到词汇映射的机制来解释。