Components of Stroop-like interference in word reading

Previous research has shown that the naming of the picture of, for example, a guitar is substantially delayed when it is accompanied by the name of an object from the same semantic category (e.g., piano) as compared to a nonword control (e.g., xxxxx). La Heij (1988a) has shown that a large part of this Stroop-like interference effect can be attributed to two semantic characteristics of the distractor word: its semantic similarity to the target picture and its semantic relevance in the task at hand. Furthermore, it was argued that the locus of these two interference effects is the process of target-name retrieval. If this is true, semantic interference effects should diminish or disappear when, instead of a picture-naming task, a word-reading task is used. In the present study this prediction is tested. The effects of four distractor characteristics are examined: semantic relatedness, semantic relevance, response set membership and wordness. In contrast to the original picture-naming task only the effect of wordness reached significance. The results of experiments 2 and 3 show that the absence of significant semantic context effects in experiment 1 is not simply due to the fact that a distractor word has less time to affect a word-reading response. The results are taken to support a name-retrieval account of semantic interference in color and picture naming.