Abstract

In the picture-word interference task, the target picture is presented with the distractor word. Participants should quickly name the target picture while ignoring the distractor word (e.g., name ‘apple’ for a picture of an apple). In Experiment 1, we examined the influence of the semantic relatedness of the distractor word on target processing using Korean stimuli. As a result of the experiment, we observed the semantic interference effect, whereby the naming time of the target picture was longer when the distractor word was semantically related to the target picture compared to when it was unrelated. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the semantic relatedness and frequency of the distractor word to examine the influence of distractor word frequency on the semantic interference effect. The results showed that the naming time of the target picture was longer for the related distractor than for the unrelated distractor (semantic interference effect). Additionally, the naming time was longer for the low frequency distractor than for the high frequency distractor (frequency effect). There was no interaction between the semantic relatedness and frequency of the distractor word. The semantic interference effect was significant in both frequency conditions, and did not vary according to frequency. These findings provide support for non-competitive theories, which suggest that interferences occur at the post-lexical response output level.