Hearing " palm tree " can hamper

Two picture-word interference experiments investigated effects from distractor words denoting objects that were visually similar to the target pictures (e.g., umbrella –– palm tree) and effects from distractor words denoting objects that were from the same semantic category (e.g., drum –– violin). In Experiment 1, participants were familiarized with pictures of the target objects and pictures of objects corresponding to the distractor words prior to the experiment. In Experiment 2, participants were only familiarized with pictures of the target objects but not with pictures of objects corresponding to the distractor words. The comparison of semantically related distractor words with an unrelated control condition showed a semantic interference effect regardless of whether the distractor words were introduced as pictures (Experiment 1) or not (Experiment 2), replicating earlier findings. By contrast, an interference effect for distractor words denoting visually similar objects was observed only when the distractor words were introduced as pictures in Experiment 1. This finding suggests that visually similarity can result in a significant interference effect in the picture-word interference task when representations of visually similar objects were activated to a sufficient extent. Implications for models of lexical access in speech production are discussed.