The role of phonetic and orthographic similarity in picture–word interference.

Abstract

Picture-word interference refers to the fact that when a picture (i.e., line drawing) is presented with a word superimposed, picture-naming latency is longer than when the same picture is presented alone. This phenomenon, like the Stroop phenomenon, seems to be strongly influenced by the nature of the superimposed word. The effects of phonetic and orthographic similarity between the word and the picture''s name were investigated to get a clearer idea of the role these factors play in the picture-naming process. Both orthographic and phonetic similarity facilitated picture naming in comparison to an unrelated word condition although not with respect to a picture alone condition. This facilitation evidently is not an output phenomenon and, as such, can be separated from the response competition processes that lead to the basic interference effect. The locus of these effects appears to be the name-retrieval process with orthographic and phonetic information from the word aiding in the search for the picture''s name.