Stroop dilution but not word-processing dilution : evidence for attention capture

Stroop dilution refers to the observation that the impact of a color word on the naming of a color bar is reduced if another word-like object is displayed simultaneously. Recently, Brown, Roos-Gilbert, and Carr (1995) concluded that Stroop dilution is due to early-visual interference. This conclusion was evaluated in three experiments. Experiment 1 showed that, contrary to the predictions of an early-visual interference account, (a) diluters that are similar in terms of visual complexity induced different amounts of dilution and (b) the size of the dilution effect is proportional to the size of the Stroop interference effect when the diluters are used as single distractors. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that when the position of the color bar is pre-cued, Stroop dilution disappears. We argue that these findings support Van der Heijden’s (1992) attention-capture account of Stroop dilution.The first author was supported by a grant of the Westfalisch-Lippische Universitatsgesellschaft, Biefeld, Germany.peer-reviewe

Phonological facilitation of grammatical gender retrieval.

In Dutch, the gender of nouns is marked by the definite articles de (common gender) and het (neuter gender). Most models of language production assume that gender information is retrieved via the noun's syntactic representation (or lemma). The authors test Caramazza's (1997) alternative proposal, according to which gender information is retrieved via the noun's phonological word form (or lexeme). In three picture-word experiments, which differed in the tasks to be performed (noun production, article+noun production, article production, and gender decision), clear phonological effects were obtained in tasks involving the retrieval of the noun's gender information. It is argued that traditional models of language production have difficulty in accounting for the occurrence and/or the size of these effects whereas they follow quite naturally from Caramazza's (1997) Independent Network model. © 2004 Psychology Press Ltd

The limitations of cascading in the speech production system

Two competing views on how information flows in the speech production system are discussed. The full-cascading view holds that all activated concepts automatically activate their lexical and phonological representations. The limited-cascading view holds that a selection procedure interrupts the automatic flow of information through the speech production system. Recently, the full-cascading view has received support from the observation that ignored pictures activate their phonological representation. In two experiments the conditions to observe this finding were examined. Using coloured pictures to name, we replicated the finding that when the picture's name is phonologically related to the name of its colour, the colour-naming task is facilitated compared with when the name of the picture is unrelated. We also show that this effect is stronger when naming the picture has been practiced. By contrast, the colour's name has no effect on naming the picture, not even when colour naming is practiced. We conclude that strong versions of both the full-cascading view and the limited-cascading view cannot account for the complete set of data

Semantic facilitation in category and action naming: Testing the message-congruency account

Basic-level picture naming is hampered by the presence of a semantically related context word (compared to an unrelated word), whereas picture categorization is facilitated by a semantically related context word. This reversal of the semantic context effect has been explained by assuming that in categorization tasks, basic-level distractor words (e.g., "dog") do not compete with the selection of the correct category label (e.g., "animal"). In this article, we test an alternative account in terms of a congruency effect ("message-congruency"), which arises at the conceptual level when target (e.g., the picture of a cat) and context (e.g., the word "dog") converge on the same to-be-verbalized concept (e.g., "animal"). In four experiments we observed a substantial message-congruency effect in categorization and action naming. Implications for models of spoken-word production are discussed

Congruency effects in conceptualizing for speech

In naming a picture at the basic level, a semantically related distractor word induces interference in comparison to an unrelated word. When the task is changed from basic-level naming to categorization, however, this effect reverses to semantic facilitation. In previous studies, this semantic facilitation effect was attributed to "message congruency" at the conceptual level. The present study examines the nature of this message congruency effect: Is it due to competition between two activated category concepts in the incongruent condition or is it due to convergence of activity on a single category concept in the congruent condition? Two experiments show that neither the strength with which the context stimulus activates an incongruent category concept nor the semantic distance between the category concepts activated by target and distractor affect target categorization speed. We conclude that the message congruency effect is most likely due to convergence on a single category concept in the category-congruent condition

Object interference in children's colour and position naming: Lexical interference or task-set competition?

Cascade models of word production assume that during lexical access all activated concepts activate their names. In line with this view, it has been shown that naming an object's colour is facilitated when colour name and object name are phonologically related (e.g., ‘blue' and ‘blouse'). Prevor and Diamond's (2005) recent observation that children take longer to name the colour of real objects than of abstract forms could also be attributed to cascaded processing, resulting in competition between colour name and object name. Experiments 1 and 2 replicate this ‘object-interference effect' in colour naming by children of 5-7 years of age and show that it generalises to position naming. Experiment 2 shows that the effect is also obtained with hard-to-name objects; a finding that is at variance with a lexical-competition account. The finding in Experiment 3 that the object-interference effect is absent in adults, is consistent with an alternative interpretation in terms of task-set competition. Implications for models of word production are discussed