%AOppenheim, G.%AFitch, T. Ed.%D2021%I %K %MOSTI ID: 10292550 %PMedium: X %TBehavioral interference or facilitation does not distinguish between competitive and noncompetitive accounts of lexical selection in word production. %XOne of the major debates in the field of word production is whether lexical selection is competitive or not. For nearly half a century, semantic interference effectsin picture naming latencieshave beenclaimed as evidence for competitive (relative threshold) models of lexical selection,while semantic facilitation effects have beenclaimed as evidence for non-competitive (simple threshold) models instead.In this paper, we use a computational modelingapproach to comparethe consequences of competitive and noncompetitive selection algorithms for blocked cyclic picture naming latencies, combined with two approaches to representing taxonomic and thematic semantic features.We show thatalthough our simplemodel can capture both semantic interference and facilitation,the presence or absence of competition in the selection mechanism is unrelated to the polarity of these semantic effects.These results question the validity of prior assumptions and offer new perspectives on the origins of interference and facilitation in languageproduction. Country unknown/Code not availablehttps://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rjezpOSTI-MSA