POLARITY EFFECTS AND THE ROLE OF STRATEGIES IN THE PICTURE-WORD INTERFERENCE PARADIGM

The role of semantic relatedness and the level of categorization in the production of subordinate category names (e.g., gorilla) has been explored with four picture-word interference experiments in students of the Universities of Naples and Trieste. When distractors were at the basic level, responses were faster with related (e.g., monkey) than unrelated (e.g., ice-cream) distractors (Experiments 1 and 3). When presented separately, subordinate distractors produced slower responses in the related (e.g., macaque) than in the unrelated (e.g., sorbet) condition (Experiment 2), and unrelated distractors produced slower responses at the subordinate (e.g., sorbet) than at the basic level (e.g, ice-cream) (Experiment 4). However, when all distractors were presented together (Experiment 1), related distractors produced facilitation, regardless of their level of categorization. The implications of the findings for current lexical models of production and for the use of the picture-naming paradigm in the study of language production are discussed.