Do elevators compete with lifts?: Selecting dialect alternatives

Recently, Melinger (2018) demonstrated that translation equivalent dialectal words compete for selection in a way that translation equivalent words from a non-target language do not. She argued that dialectal words are stored as within-language representations. However, Dylman and Barry (2018) showed that within-language synonyms behave like between-language translation equivalents, calling Melinger's interpretation into question. The aim of the present study is to compare dialectal and non-dialectal synonyms distractor effects with the same experimental design to elaborate our understanding of how dialectal lexical items are stored and retrieved during production. In two experiments, American translation equivalents slowed British picture naming times, replicating the findings from Melinger (2018). In a third experiment, synonymous distractor words did not slow picture naming times, replicating the findings from Dylman and Barry (2018). A proposal couched within the Swinging Lexical Network approach is proposed to explain the discrepant findings.